Safe to publish port 80 on IIS 7.5 webserver?

Question

Is it safe enough to set my firewall to forward port 80 and 443 to my IIS 7.5 webserver?

I know that TMG has some packet inspections, but my current firewall has no inspections, so I wonder if it's safe enough to publish port 80 and 443 on my IIS 7.5 webserver directly to the internet?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You should be reasonably safe - you'd be amazed how many servers are running IIS that aren't behind a firewall at all. If there's sensitive data (credit card numbers, etc) you'd want to be more cautious, but for normal use, it's not something I'd be worried about.

The real risk is from whatever you're hosting - the applications you host are more likely to cause security issues than exposing the server itself.