how secure is remote desktop?

[Guest]

I have been running remote desktop at work and have the firewall set to pass a request using a non-standard port to the specified windows XP Pro machine. When our corporate IT guy found out he freaked citing that since I was not establishing a VPN it was not secure as someone could "watch" the port and pickup my user id and password and then log on later to access/compromise our network. How possible is this? What additional steps can I take to make it more secure? Until I can convince him that it is secure, he has disabled my access. Our firewall is a Watchdog soho unit.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Remote Desktop uses its own encryption for the data stream, so it is somewhat secure. However, any encryption can be broken, given enough time. You're better off going through the VPN, and letting the VPN provide the open port after you've authenticated. Then you're doubly secure, as the VPN traffic is encrypted as well.