Question about Samba Security

[Dave Abouav]

Hi,

I am the resident IT guy at a small, but growing company. I setup Samba 
(most recent version) on a FreeBSD 6.1 server which everyone in the 
company now uses to store personal and shared files. It's great. We have 
a few employees who work outside of the office though, and I want them 
to be able to access the same filesystem somehow. I thinking about 
setting up our router to forward port 139 so that out outside employees 
can access the Samba server (so long as they have the IP of our router, 
which is static). But I have security concerns in doing this. Is this 
risk of being attacked/hacked over port 139 very high? Is Samba as 
vulnerable to attacks over port 139 as an actual Windows server is? If 
so, can someone recommend another solution? Setting up a VPN is an 
project that I don't have time to get involved with. Please reply to my 
email: dave at transducertech.com.

Thanks,
Dave


Dave Abouav
Product Manager & Software Engineer
KWJ Engineering, Transducer Technology Division
Phone: (510) 791-0951
Fax: (510) 794-4330
Email: dave at transducertech.com