Telnet dangerous?

[zazoo]

What’s the dangers in Telnet and FTP?
I mean, what can people do with it?

(I'm not planning to hack any system or anything i would just like to offer ftp without being hacked myself)

[robin]

telnet allows users to run programs on your machine. this can be exploited in many ways, from running a program that eats up all the memory to causing a buffer overflow and getting root access.

there are also lots of exploits for ftp programs to cause buffer overflows and whatnot, but ftp is generally more secure, as long as you pick a really stable ftp server and keep it updated with security patches and whatnot.