How Secure is Remote Desktop Services

[mccullrr]

Hello. I am the Network Administrator of a college campus. I have several administrators requesting remote desktop access to their office machines. Does anyone know how secure this is? Remote Desktop is blocked via our firewall and I would have to open up the port for the particular office machines wanting access. Does anyone see this as a potential problem?

Thanks!

 

[Supergrrover]

An issue is that you can only have the one port redirected to one machine. You will need multiple ports open (one per machine.) 3389, 3390, 3391, etc. So the remote users have to connect to the non-standard port.
Script kiddies commonly scan for these open ports and hammer your boxes with brute force attacks until they guess your passwords, so it is a better idea to use ports that are in the lower 1024 that aren't being used by your network. A VPN would be a better all around solution.


Brent
Systems Engineer / Consultant
CCNP, CCSP

 

[DTSMAN]

They could each setup their own logmein or gotomypc account on their machines.

Bo

Remember,
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they should at least find you handy.
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