DescentBB

I read that I should disable plug and play. I'm looking at settings. Is this it?

UPnP is just a system for automatic port forwarding in the event an application needs a listening port for something (like online games/im clients/vnc/P2P/etc). Disabling it won't really do anything for your security, but might make some features in various UPnP supporting applications stop working.

I'll have to get part of the transcript from the "security Now" program I was listening to and it's not up yet.

The info starts about half way down page 3 on this transcript. http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-315.pdf

If you follow through on the links and do your research you can see which devices are actually susceptible to a UPnP breach. You would be better served by updating the firmware on your device to a version that fixes the issue, or if the manufacturer has quit releasing security updates for it then you should buy a new router from someone that continues to support their products.

See the list of known buggy firmware devices here:
http://www.upnp-hacks.org/devices.html

Thanks Krom. I did see the router companies they were talking about but didn't know if there were other's.. Mine is not among them.

By the list's own admission, it is far from exhaustive.

Also keep in mind that the list is old, and almost every device in the list has already been patched.

I've personally disabled UPnP on my router, only because my WHS v1 tries to periodically check/update the port-forwarding via UPnP, but I'd rather handle it myself.