Why are my FTP users able to access / and other high-level directories?

Question

Why are my FTP users able to access / and other high-level directories?

Answer

If your FTP users are able to access / and other critical directories this means they are not chrooted to their specific document root.

If you want the FTP users to be locked to their document root you need edit the configuration file for ProFTP or PureFTP respectively.

For Pure FTP, you can find the ChrootEveryone option in your FTP configuration file. By default, this is set to yes. 

Here you can see the setting in the configuration file:

[root@test ~]# grep -i chroot /etc/pure-ftpd.conf
ChrootEveryone yes

For ProFTP, you will need to uncomment the following line in /etc/proftpd.conf:

#DefaultRoot ~

Once the changes have been made, you may need to restart the service. For PureFTP, you can run this script:

/scripts/restartsrv_pureftpd

For ProFTP, you can run the following:

/scripts/restartsrv_proftpd