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paullord

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Port 443 risk

What is the risk in opening TCP port 443 for both inbound and out bound traffic on a firewall?
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WakaMang

I don't think there is a risk. You only need to open it for inbound traffic when you have an internal
website running on 443 and you make sure it also is a https certificate with a trusted certificate to encrypt traffic.

When you want to open it for outbound traffic your users can acces https sites(wich are normally running on 443) wich also use certificates to encrypt traffic.
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ASKER

Specifically I was opening it for Windows Mobile Active Sync. Any issues with that ?
As long as you are patched out you should be ok.  Generally security risks come from administrators having open ports to services they are unaware of or not maintaining.  A number of known worms scan for vulnerable machines on 443/tcp but if you stay on top of patching your services, you should be as safe as anyone can be.
What aaronblum is saying; Keep you're servers updated especially the ones wich are accessible from the internet, when your system is updates you can scan the vulnerability with some tools you can find on the internet, here an example:
http://www.freewebs.com/okidan/
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Paranormastic
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Yup, and the only way to make it impossible to hack your machine is to turn it off and unplug everything from it :)  (in the case of a laptop, pull the battery too)