As work from home is the new norm in the coronavirus era, you’re probably thinking of enabling remote desktop connections for your off-site staff. Here’s how to do it securely.
Accessing your servers’ or workstations’ desktops remotely is a great way to manage them. It’s also a huge target for hackers.
For example, if hackers can gain access to the administrator login to your Domain Controller, they effectively own your Windows infrastructure and can quickly wreak havoc on your organization. From sending corporate emails to accounting departments and books, to siphoning off your company’s intellectual property, to encrypting all your company’s files and holding them for ransom, hacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) can be very bad.
In this context, although we will mainly say “RDP”, we mean all kinds of remote desktop and remote access software, including VNC, PC Anywhere, TeamViewer and so forth, not just Microsoft’s RDP. The good news is there are many defenses against RDP attacks, starting with turning it off. If you don’t really need remote access, the ‘off’ switch is the simplest.
If you do need to allow such access, there are a variety of ways to restrict it to the good guys:
First off, allow access only from internal IP addresses coming from your company’s VPN server. This has the added benefit of not exposing RDP connection ports to the public internet.
Speaking of exposing ports, if that’s your only choice, you may want to serve up RDP on a non-standard port number to avoid simplistic worms from attacking your network through its RDP ports. Keep in mind, though, that most network scanners check all ports for RDP activity, so this should be viewed as security t ..
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