Remote desktop/remote Assistance

hey guys quick question. MS says this is safe to use over the internet. What is the general opinion on this? I know alot of people will say automatically that its MS so its bad. However are there any specific problems that anyone has heard of regarding its use over the internet?
Thanks in advance.

It is meant to be safe if the higher 128 bit encryption level is used, but I always tunnel it over SSH.

yeah from what I gather its pretty safe. Alot of the guys at my work were doubting it tho. Worried about the port being open and script kitties doing a can and hackin in with brute force tech..

I'm not sure how they'd accomplish this, however I'm not much of a hacker so I can't argue the point.

The only way I can see it is if a person didn't rename thier builtin user accounts and shut off the local sec pol not to lock out after 3 retrys.

Even then is this much of a threat? I"m curious to hear what other people have to say about this.

I don't know much about the protocol it uses in transit but a couple of points I would consider

1. Be wary of sharing your hard disc if you are the connecting party (this is in the remote desktop setup options) - this exposes your HD to the machine at the other end

2. Be sure to have your AV upto date and running when you connect and probably also a personal firewall - How do you know if the party you are connecting to is clean or not been compromised.

3. If this is for supporting an esatblished user basis then educate them/use policies to lock down so that they can only invite remote assistance form your trusted support people. You don't want Jim in accounts inviting his unknown hacker brother to provide remote assistance on your corporate network.

4. Lock down permission so only those trusted suport people have the permission to use remote desktop on that users machine. Otherwise imagine the hell if an office love affair went wrong and every man and his dog was remote desktopping into each others box!

Just a couple of thoughts/concepts. I haven't played around with Remote desktop enough to be more practical or specific but hope this helps
Lock down permission