This topic has been marked solved and closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.
Is having NAT Filtering set to "Open" safe for your PC?
I have multiple consoles and a PC for gaming. My brothers and I play various online Multiplayer games on our consoles and on PC, and we've had some NAT issues. We've tried everything, UPnP, Port Forwarding, and since there are three of us with the same consoles and PC's trying to play the same game, opening ports using Port Forwarding isn't an option, and UPnP isn't reliable.
What did work for us was setting "NAT Filtering" in the WAN settings to "Open" instead of "Secured" which is the default. I'm a little apprehensive on leaving that setting to "Open" though, since it seems like you are getting less protection than if it were on "Secured."
I'm not concerned about my consoles but I am concerned about our PC's. I've looked around for an answer to this but haven't found anything specific about how leaving it Open would affect your PC security. Most people just suggest leaving it open for your consoles to work without any sort of explanation of how that might affect the rest of your devices. There's also very little info on this particular setting in forums and even in the Netgear router manuals.
Essentially, how exposed would your PC be to the internet leaving this setting Open?
Re: Is having NAT Filtering set to "Open" safe for your PC?
Secured is of course the optimum choice for security which also comes at the disadvantage where legitimate traffic from your consoles/PC etc is then impacted, with Open your router firewall is still doing its job but it isn't as strict in that sense. It doesn't mean it allows any traffic to the point where your network can be compromised but it does allow legitimate traffic to/from devices to flow without issue. I do recommend people use the option and thus far I have never seen anyone have a security issue with the option set to Secured or Open, I use Open myself as well. Unfortunately it's not a feature we (Netduma) have created so I don't have any more specific information for you about how it works but suffice to say, as long as you have some good Anti-Virus on your PC (which I would recommend anyone has) as well then you shouldn't have any problems.
Re: Is having NAT Filtering set to "Open" safe for your PC?
Secured is of course the optimum choice for security which also comes at the disadvantage where legitimate traffic from your consoles/PC etc is then impacted, with Open your router firewall is still doing its job but it isn't as strict in that sense. It doesn't mean it allows any traffic to the point where your network can be compromised but it does allow legitimate traffic to/from devices to flow without issue. I do recommend people use the option and thus far I have never seen anyone have a security issue with the option set to Secured or Open, I use Open myself as well. Unfortunately it's not a feature we (Netduma) have created so I don't have any more specific information for you about how it works but suffice to say, as long as you have some good Anti-Virus on your PC (which I would recommend anyone has) as well then you shouldn't have any problems.
