Puzzle for January 30, 2006

One well-known institution has a world-writable ftp subdirectory to allow outsiders to deposit items there for internal users, who may retrieve the items. The directory is periodically cleaned using a cron(8) job that changes the current working directory to that directory and deletes all files in it.

  1. What are some problems with allowing outsiders to drop files off in an ftp area?
  2. Does the solution adopted (to clean out the directory) overcome these problems?

Version of January 30, 2006 at 7:40 PM
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