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Following Configuring Remote Administration and Feature Delegation in IIS 7, I configured the IIS Management Service to use port 8080 instead of the default 8172. Is this safe? Could there be potential problems from a user/attacker outside the network attempting to connect to this port?

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    No port is "safe" if it's exposed to those who would seek to take nefarious advantage of its availability.
    – joeqwerty
    Mar 12, 2013 at 18:35

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No port is "safe," because ports do not provide security.

The primary advantage of running service on non-standard ports is that doing so serves to hide the existence of those services from port scans and typical brute-force attacks. So, in that sense, I would certainly not change the IIS Management Service port to a port that's standard for another type of traffic, because you're somewhat defeating the whole purpose of changing your port by doing so.

I would either not change the standard port (if you don't have a good reason to do so, like receiving probes or scans on that port, you don't gain anything from doing it), or change it to a high port that's not used by default for another type of traffic (as port 8080 is).

Either way, though, you should really be relying on an edge firewall to provide security against attackers outside the network, rather than changing default ports for your management services.

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