Hi John,

If a port is not specified in your NFS mount command, then mount will default to port 139. It would probably be better to use the port=someportnumber option in the mount command to assign a port number that would be more difficult to find. If a hacker finds any open port, whether it's 25,110,80, 5432, 1033, etc, it could be attacked, but failing a buffer overflow that bombed out the login mechanism the attacker would need a username and password. Since most open ports have a service running on them like postgres, MySQL, http, smtp, pop3, etc, the service can be configured to log failed attempts capturing the IP address of the attacker. This can be used to trace back to the source of the attack, if the attacker has not telneted or sshed across a barrage of networks before launching an attack, which would make a trace much more difficult.