Cuteftp – Must be an administrator or have the appropriate permissions error

I’ve been using Cuteftp (v8.3) to manage my files between hard drive and server. Everything was working ok. Then all of a sudden I tried to view a picture file on my server and CuteFTP gave me the following error –

You must be an administrator or have the appropriate permissions to perform this operation

The built in CuteFTP help system didn’t help at all. I tried searching for the phrase “must be an administrator or have the appropriate permissions” but nothing came up. So I searched Google and found several results on the first page. I found several different potential causes for this error, but none of them helped.

Solved

I eventually tracked the reason for this error. It was caused by my virus checker Bitdefender Internet Security 2017. I had recently activated one of its features – Ransomware Protection and Bitdefender had quietly decided that CuteFTP was trying to alter my protected files. So it blocked it from changing anything.

I can only assume that CuteFTP gave this operation error because it was unable to write to my hard drive – and didn’t know why. I fixed the issue by adding CuteFTP as a safe program. This is likely to be an unusual cause of the error, so if not applicable you should continue researching all the other causes.