Are you a web master, developer or admin, using Filezilla to connect to FTP sites and have you forgotten your password? No, you should not change your password from WHM-cPanel or Plesk.
Below we will describe how we can find the forgotten password on the Filezilla site.
Open Filezilla and go to the Site Manager:
As you can see in the image, the Password appears with the familiar black dots.
However, if you right-click in the left column on the site name (iGuRu.gr), the application will give you the export option.
Extract the sites.xml file to your desktop and open it with your favorite txt editor.
Above you see the password as:
cmV0cmVpdmUgcGFzc3dvcmQgZnJvbSBmaWxlemlsbGEgaWd1cnUuZ3I=
However, the password is encrypted with base64. So if you try to connect with it, you won't be able to.
Older versions of Filezilla stored passwords in plain text format. So if you are using an older version you can skip the following step.
So the new versions use base64 for more protection. Let's see how much security it adds to the ftp client.
Let's go to the following address:
https://www.hcidata.info/base64.htm
We will use the first frame located approximately in the middle of the page.
We copy and paste the encrypted code, click on the first button and it appears decrypted as shown in the image below:
So our forgotten password was:
retrieve password from filezilla secnews.gr
That was it… If you don't store your passwords anywhere (for obvious reasons) and you don't want to change the password from WHM-cPanel or Plesk because you would have to change it on every system you use an ftp client on, the above method is a solution. Now you can log in to your site…
However, after my anxiety about finding the password I forgot, I started thinking about how “seriously” some programs take security. Filezilla, for example, added base64 encoding to prevent password hacking…
