How to Change the Remove Desktop (RDP) Port

You can use "Remote Desktop Connection" tool to connect to other PC and mange them remotely. It is a great tool that is really helpful specially when are talking about outsourcing industry. I do not mean this is only helpful only in IT outsourcing industry, but what I meant it is providing a huge help on that industry because you need to work on windows based machines while you are setting in a different country.

For me, I exposed my personal PC at home to be accessible from public internet network in order to be able to connect to it while I am travelling or at work. But this means I am also exposing my personal PC for hacking risk specially when I am not having a very good secured network infra-structure at home.

Hiding the Remote Desktop port is one step is to make my personal hard to hack. The default remote desktop’s port is 3389. so I decided to change it to something else to make it harder for hackers to attack on my PC. Below is the steps of how to do it:

1. Click on Start menu
2. Choose Run , this will open the RUN dialog box
3. Type REGEDIT and click on ok, this will launch the Registry Editor for you
4. Locate the following key in the registry
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Current\ControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber

5. Double click on PortNumber and choose "Decimal" option then change the port number there to something else, let’s say you changed it to be 3333

6. Click OK , then quit Registry Editor
EditDWORDRegistryValue
To connect to the PC, you need to type the port number along with PC’s name or IP just like blow examples:
1. PCNAME:333
2. 192.168.1.100:333