tangent
IPCT Contributor
- May 12, 2016
- 4,618
- 3,972
To advocate this (easily some of the worst security advice I can remember seeing on the internet) you pretty much have to be a troll or maybe you just like the feeling of being violated. If you're a cheapskate and what to run ancient hardware, there's a solution it's called linux and it actually still gets security patches.
Straight out of high school I used to think if you're behind a NAT don't forward ports to anything insecure, don't use standard ports, use antivirus, turn off some pdf and office features, keep your software updated, are careful about what you open and run a syslog server you're reasonably secure. Then I saw saw some of the security measures used by my university and decided to restrict forwarded ports to specific ip ranges and install an open source hids. I saw very frequent attempts to access my ssh server (on a non-standard port) and switched from a password to keys and port knocking. I made the mistake of forwarding RDP on a non-standard port (I couldn't ssh tunnel from certain parts of the campus network) and only certain IPs could connect and I generally had things locked down pretty well (or so I thought). Then I had a conversation with a friend about an emerging security topic, someone was listening and the rest is history.
