Decrypting WS-FTP Accounts
A while back in the Forum, I was asked if I knew how WS-FTP accounts could be saved and distributed from one machine to another. As I was short on time, I said "No," since that happened to be the truth. However, a couple of months later, for one reason or another, I wanted to transfer all of my FTP accounts from WS-FTP to the popular freeware FileZilla FTP client. This would have been easy enough to do manually, had it not been for one particular old account, the password of which I could not remember. So I set about finding how WS-FTP stores FTP accounts. And this is what I found...
Within the folder:
c:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Application Data\Ipswitch\WS_FTP\Sites
there is a set of ini files. One of these ini files, WS_FTP.ini references all of the others, except for one: a file called original.ini.
It is the original.ini file that stores all of my FTP accounts. All of the account information (host, username, password, etc) is in this file. Sadly, the passwords are encrypted. Well, actually, that's not sad at all! I wouldn't be pleased with an application that stores all of my passwords in unencrypted plain text. But WS-FTP is a bit of a halfway house. It turns out that the encryption they use isn't particular complicated and was easy to break.
Hoorah! I was able to decrypt the passwords in this file and determine what my long-lost password was. Knowing full well that there are other people who would like to be able to retrieve their old passwords, I decided to make this page. The form below will allow you to decrypt your WS-FTP account passwords. Look for the line that starts:
PWD=V75D77....
Copy the encrypted password (the bit that starts after the equals sign) into the form below and submit.