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.
I just had the same issue again after my virus checker updated itself and lost my old settings. I immediately remembered that I’d had this fault before and searched in Google for it. Amazingly my own article above was number one and I quickly remembered what was causing the issue 🙂
i had exactly this issue yesterday and this and one other post were all i could find searching for that message. cute ftp was not actually entering any info in the log, just this message in a popup.
I tried all sorts of things to diagnose and fix it. I tried whitelisting in my antivirus – avira, and changing connections first, the issue persisted. So then I tried disabling all firewall blocks, adjusting file and folder permissions (per the other ms post), running as administrator and many reboots.
I’ve used avira a long time and used to really like it. Now I use them just because I have for so long and who likes major change? But it has gotten much more intrusive over the years and apparently it caused the problem within itself (which I suspected first from your post hence the whitelist). Today I started it up and it updated again and everything went back to working as it had. So I can only gather avira (and one of its many new ‘security suite products it pushes) had some sort of block such as your post identifies. Thanks