How safe is port forwarding ?

Question

How safe is port forwarding ?

I'm forced to use port forwarding on my AirPort Extreme (ports 3283 and 5900) to allow working with Apple Remote Desktop (a remote management software).

Unfortunately this is the only way to make this software working. So my question is how safe is port forwarding ? Should I take care to something when enabling it, is there a risk of abusing the open ports ?

Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Nov 6, 2006 12:43 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

157,884 points

Nov 6, 2006 1:13 PM in response to tobias Eichner

As you are already aware, port mapping tells the base station to forward all incoming Internet requests, using specific port numbers, to a specific computer on your local network. This means that all "unsolicited" requests from the Internet will pass thru the router to this computer, including potential harmful ones.

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Answer 2

Nov 6, 2006 1:25 PM in response to Tesserax

Yes, that's my question 😉

I disabled controlling my computer with Remote Desktop at system settings / sharing already.

However since on these ports traffic comes in, I don't know if this is the only thing I can do. Maybe there is anything else ?

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

157,884 points

Nov 6, 2006 1:46 PM in response to tobias Eichner

I suggest that you run the OS X firewall and use an anti-virus program (like ClamXav) on the target computer just in case.

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Answer 4

Nov 6, 2006 3:34 PM in response to Tesserax

Firewall is enabled and I also have an anti-virus software installed. So far, anything seems to be okay.

I also got told in an other thread for a similar topic that this is the common proceeding.

Furthermore I'll go on and configure our main router to block incoming traffic to these ports that does not origin from our IP address range. So it is like having these ports never enabled.

Anyway, thank you for your tips.

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