You’ve already done the work: you’ve chosen a solid router, set a real administrator password, and maybe even spent money on a mesh system and a VPN subscription. Your home network feels locked down, and honestly, it probably is. Then one day, you want to check your security cameras from the office and you activate an innocent little setting to make it happen.
That setting is port forwarding and can be problematic. Not because port forwarding is bad, but because it does exactly one thing very well: it puts a permanent hole in the wall that kept the Internet out of your house.
Your router is a gatekeeper and port forwarding gives you a behind-the-scenes pass
Everything good about your network security starts with closing the door
By default, your router uses something called NAT and acts as a firewall that rejects every unsolicited hit from the outside world. If someone on the Internet tries to access a device inside your home, the router shrugs and discards the request because it has no idea where to send it. That “I don’t know you, leave” behavior is the main reason why random strangers can’t just walk into your network. It’s a fantastic security feature and it’s free.
Port forwarding is about approaching the gatekeeper and saying, “Actually, let this specific traffic through, always and forever.” You’re telling the router that anything that arrives on a certain port should be sent directly to a device inside your home. The problem is that the Internet is not a polite place, and once that door is open, it is open to everyone, not just you.
9/10
- Brand
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Unifi
- Range
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1,750 square feet
Having a good router is an important part of having a secure network. The UniFi Dream Router 7 is one of our favorites here at How-To Geek.
The Internet Finds Your Open Port Faster Than You Think
Nobody searches for you manually, and that is exactly the problem
I think a lot of people assume they’re safe because they’re nobody. Who’s going to bother targeting my random home network, right? But all this doesn’t work like that.
Attackers don’t sit around guessing your IP address and trying ports one by one. They use automated scanners that constantly sweep the entire Internet, cataloging every device that responds. There are entire search engines, like Shodan, dedicated to indexing Internet-connected devices and the open ports behind which they are located. Point one at the web and you can find thousands of exposed cameras, routers and servers.
If you want a really scary example of how quickly this happens, the security people at Sophos ran an experiment where they pulled up a server, exposed Remote Desktop to the Internet, and walked away.
Login attempts started in less than a minute. Over 15 days, they recorded more than two million failed login attempts from almost a thousand different IP addresses.
And before you think “I’ll use a weird port number so no one finds it,” they tested that too. Scanners identify an open service no matter which port it is hiding on. some of these insecure default router settings It’s worth checking these before forwarding a single port.
An exposed device becomes a door to the entire house.
The camera is not the prize, your network is
Let’s say you forward a port to a cheap IP camera so you can keep an eye on your porch while you’re away. Worst case scenario, someone sees your porch, right? Desire.
The real danger is that the exposed device becomes a foothold. Once an attacker compromises that camera, they are inside your network and can now move laterally to everything else. In security circles, this is called lateral movement, and it’s the only reason a single weak, exposed device is so important.
This is also how home devices get dragged into botnets. The infamous Mirai attacks in 2016 accomplished this on a massive scale, hijacking IoT devices like cameras and using them to launch one of the largest denial-of-service attacks the Internet has ever seen.
Your compromised device not only puts you at risk; You may end up as an involuntary soldier in someone else’s army. And ransomware teams love exposed storage.
There are ransomware families that specifically scan the Internet for externally accessible NAS boxes, which is why the advice of stop exposing your NAS to the Internet exists in the first place. One port open and your most important files will become a target.
There is almost certainly no need for port forwarding.
There are safer ways to access your stuff from anywhere
Hannah Stryker / How to Geek
Most of the reasons people forward ports now have much more secure alternatives. The goal of port forwarding is usually “I want to communicate with a device at home while I’m away.” You can do this without exposing anything to the public Internet. The cleanest option for most people is a VPN or overlay network. Instead of opening a door to a specific device, you create a private, encrypted tunnel that only you can enter, and once inside, everything behaves as if you were at home.
Tools like Tailscale and WireGuard have made this surprisingly easy. Tailscale, in particular, creates a private mesh between your devices using the WireGuard protocol and, importantly, does not require you to open any ports. Install an app, log in, and your devices can communicate with each other securely from anywhere in the world. If you host things yourself, this is a safer alternative to port forwarding it’s worth setting up. A reverse proxy is another route if you’re comfortable with a little more setup. The point is that the old advice of “just port forward” is really outdated for the vast majority of home use cases.
So before you move forward, ask yourself if you really have to do it.
The next time an app or guide tells you to forward a port, pause for a second and ask if there’s a way to do it without opening your network to the entire planet. Most of the time there is. First look for a VPN or overlay network, keep UPnP turned off so nothing forwards ports behind your back, and if you forward anything, forward it as little as possible and protect it well. Your security system only works if the front door remains closed, so don’t be the one to leave it open just for a little convenience.
