How to Restrict Remote Desktop sharing ?

[giridharrao]

Dear All,

Can we block the remote desktop sharing over internet from the LAN internally with firewall through content filtering.

for example - a corporate LAN network having with gateway firewall and Internet.

A user having admin priviledges in his office local machine access internet and installs Remote desktop sharing application like logmein.

Now, Will the firewall still block the user when he try to access his local machine remotely over internet or allow him to have access smoothly ?

Incase if he gets access, how do we can block or deny access on these kind of appilcation getting installed technically.

[Rich464]

That entirely depends on your firewall policy and the firewall you currently have in place. Any decent firewall should have a restricted rule base which you open up as desired so in theory, unless you specifically allow that access manually, yeah it should be blocked.

test it from an external IP.

[giridharrao]

Thanks for your brief explanation. Will get back after testing from external ip.

Regards,
Giri

[Cellus]

In many cases attempting to use remote administration software within a corporate network will fail unless port forwarding and access control is set up properly on the routers, firewalls, and so forth.

It is highly recommended in a controlled corporate network that regular users are not granted administrative rights to their PCs, even if it is only as local admins. Giving admin rights to users can (and will) cause significant headaches down the road as they have full reign over their own PCs. Security of the PCs, for example, goes down the toilet as they can install and configure the PC at their wim (or, by the nature of just being logged in as admins, allow malware to do the same). This issue you have with users installing remote admin software on PCs is a huge no-no - stop the buck right there and do not give them admin rights. While this may increase your workload (any required software that needs installation has to be done by you as well as tweaking user rights to allow particularly "needy" software to run), the security benefit is significant. Infact the benefit is so significant that almost every corporate environment restricts user rights as a matter of practice.

[giridharrao]

To
CELLUS,

You had flashed some good light on this.

Thanking you,

Regards,
Giridhar Rao