Disable internet and forwarding port for accessing outside

[riaj uddin]

Hi,
I want to secure my nas and for this I have disabled internet in my nas and forwarding a port to a public ip to access from outside. Is it secured enough to prevent my nas from ransomware attack?

Thanks!

[Nazar78]

Disabling the port forwarding will improve the NAS security but disabling its internet you'll lose some of its capabilities but that is your choice.

[riaj uddin]

Thanks for your suggestion. the thing is I do not want to use VPN but i need to access file from outside. for this i needed to forward the port, basically that was not port forwarding it was NAT forwarding. i think this is the only option without vpn. beside this also i need to secure my nas against ransomeware attack, so i turned off the internet in server. note that i am using nas only for smb share nothing else.

can you please describe what kind of capabilities i will lose if i disable the internet?

[Nazar78]

Without internet, you won't get updates and definitely you can't access the NAS outside your network. If you do not want to use VPN nor port forwarding, then the only way is through a relay tunnel called EZ-Connect. This will create a connection to the Asustor server and you can connect to the Asustor server to access your NAS. Do note however this is slightly slower connection because there's a node in-between you and your NAS which is the Asustor server.

[riaj uddin]

What if I will enable internet in nas once a week just to update ADM?

[Nazar78]

It's up to you. To me, enabling the EZ-Connect without allowing UPnP or port forwarding is good enough whilst still maintaining the internet connectivity. For me personally I use vpn and reverse proxy.