The dangers of anonymous ftp

I recently had a problem with my VPS (virtual private server) website going off line.

It turned out that the reason for this was that i had exceeded the storage volume on the server. This was quite strange in that i hadn't added much that week, and certainly not enough to fill the server.
After doing a little bit of research i found 4.4 gb's of data that somebody had uploaded to my anonymous ftp directory.

It would seem that there are a number of sites on the internet that will search for and find websites that have open anonymous ftp ports which can then be used for sharing data in my case a bit torrent stream.

This of course was entirely my own fault, as i had never checked or changed the default settings on the server, but it did cause me a bit of a head ache.