is port forwarding safe, and does it affect a computer or the entire network?

Question

i'm thinking about trying out port forwarding, for a few different reasons, but i'm not sure how safe it is, as in hackable, and also if the port is specific to a computer or the entire network. can someone help?

Answer 1

Port forwarding on a router opens ports to the out side world, so there is a security concern there. However port forwarding has its ups and down, some services like IIS rely on certain ports to be open such as for ftp port 21 without the port open it is very likely that the service would fail. along with that port forwarding can be set up for a machine or a whole network of machines, it just depends how you open the ports. Is there a specific port you are going to open?

Answer 2

Port forwarding is run by the Router instead of a computer, so it's not going to go with you back home, but you can disable it by a click of a button when you need to. To explain it a little, port forwarding makes it so any traffic coming in from "outside" your network (internet / ISP), with a destination port that you specified, to go to the specified "internal" IP address (in your house), being your machine. So basically if let's say you're setting up a Minecraft server, if you enable port forwarding for the Minecraft Server's port (which only that program uses) that means if someone tries to connect to :25565 then it will ALWAYS be directed to your computer. If it's just Minecraft then it's really okay, I mean if you overwrote another port forward rule that he already had in place for his own server then that would screw things up (in which case you would just change your port to something else then forward that), however if it's something quite popular like say port 80 (which is HTTP), then that routes pretty much every web-based traffic to one machine which would really screw things up. So basically, if you're port forwarding non well-known ports (which are >1024) it's okay but if you're forwarding well-known ports (<1024) then you need to be careful. :)

Answer 3

Port forwarding is sometimes good and sometimes bad , it all depends on the way that we use it . For eg ; it can be used to block or divert some unwanted contents to an office network