Securing FTP Tutorial : Part 1

In case you are relatively new around server administration or security, we will suggest to read the IPTables series – IPTables Basics Tutorial Part 1, IPTables Basics Tutorial Part 2, IPTables Basics Tutorial Part 3. Otherwise it will be meaningless to secure only FTP. Securing FTP Tutorial is an Important Series of Guide to Secure Your Cloud Server or Virtual Server. This guide is not for dedicated server. We tried to keep the guide as easy as possible.

Securing FTP Tutorial : After Our IPTables Guide

After reading our iptables Basics tutorials, your port 21 is already closed. FTP used port 21 by default and port 22 can be used by SCP. We already changed settings on /etc/ssh/sshd_config file in those tutorial to disallow root access. For one user, Factually if you use Fail2Ban rules for FTP to restrict number of attempts, it becomes difficult to get inside the server. Our FTP port it already closed. It utilises the SSH protocol and, as a result, it works easily when connecting to a remote Unix machine. We can see /var/log/messages file for log for the attempts of ftp@ip.a.d.re.ss. But not always people want SSH username and FTP username same. Rather want to restrict FTP user.

Securing FTP Tutorial : Part 1

First we need to install openssh-server id not installed :

We are creating a new group named ftpaccess for the FTP users :

Add user named example-change to the group :

password :

Now how the added SFTP user “example-change” can also access the website’s directory like /var/www/html via SFTP?
Use the following commands when /var/www/html/ is the directory where your website files are :

and then added the following line to that fstab:

Now open /etc/ssh/sshd_config file :

You’ll find a line on that file :

comment the above line and add these lines at the end of the file (or make sure that the lines are not already present on the file) :

Restart sshd service :

Now, we can install a software named VsFTPD to manage FTP stuffs more strictly :

Some lines on /etc/vsftpd.conf should be like this :

Restart vsftpd :