Blocking incoming ips on router ports

[tvout]

Hi all, i have a linksys wrt54g v2 which has port forwarding on 21 (ftp) and 80 (http). I have an ip camera on port 80. I'm not too worried about who accesses that but my main concern is with the ftp. I bought a landisk from maplin which is a case for an ide disk with built in http and ftp server. You create accounts with passwords which i've done. I hear it start up with unknown ip addresseses

---------- Post added at 15:24 ---------- Previous post was at 15:10 ----------

Accessing it from the us or australia late in the evening. The drive makes constant short noises like someone is doing something to it. It goes on for ages and i usually switch it off. If i look up the inbound ip address on that port it doesn't usually give much info. Any ideas? Is this a hacking attempt? Can i block specific ips on a port? Should i be concerned? Cheers

[Aragorn]

Any open ftp servers are a honeypot for hackers and bots.
Ftp is easy to break into (passwords are sent in clear text, unless using sftp) and I would suggest that all your files are available to the world. If you have any write enabled accounts on that server, the disk probably does/will have all sorts of pron, malware etc downloaded to it.

[Stuart]

tvout, tbh, unless there is a specific reason that you need to share your disk over the internet, I would avoid sharing it.

[tvout]

Cheers guys. I really use it for family to access and share pics and videos. I also use it in conjunction with the webcam which uploads a picture to it at set intervals. This is using the internal ip. I've disabled port forwarding on the router now on the ftp port. It's not possible to restrict access to that port by incoming ip is it on that router?

[altis]

Dunno about that Linksys. Look at the page where you have set up port forwarding. My Netgear allows you to restrict access by time and by IP range - although this would not be much good if your family are dotted (ha!) about.