Port Forwarding and Safety

[Troy2002XP]

I am currently using port forwarding from my proxy server to one of my client machines on the network in order to use PCanywhere as a host so I can log in from home via internet. Does anyone see any safety issues with this? Does port forwarding open a gateway for others to access my network? If so, what should I do to prevent this?

[DVNT1]

Yes it does, but its a trade off for usability. There are way to do port redirecting but from what I understand you shouldn't to be too concerned about it.

pcAnywhere though can be broken by brute force and there are scripts for doing that. I don't know which versions are most exploitable but you should set the security settings within pcAnywhere as high and restrictive as you can. If the pcAnywhere host is hacked then your entire LAN is a great risk.

Ideally you would even change the ports pcAnywhere is listening on to make it harder to find. The hacking scripts typically only scan the default pcAnyhwere ports.