I only expose myself in public. I am not telling people to hack the ever loving shit oout of their routers and install a 3rd party firmware. i'm telling them to look at how their network is set up, and how to work with the functions that already exist on the routers to make their network setups better. My router is not open and most modern routers come with a SPI firewall. Stateful Packet Inspection firewalls check at packet level for outbound conversations and let the inbound reply back in. If an inbound packet hits the firewall without a corresponding outbound one the router drops the connection. There is a really minimal surface area for attack unless you really, really wanted an open Nat and turned off the firewall. The surface area for attack is greater with that set up [spoiler]But of course you already know all this, and how silly do I feel having to teach you about the capabilities of home routers, right :?[/spoiler] DMZ in most routers still have the device logically still inside the network. It only forwards all ports to it. Agreed that Dedicated servers would go a long way, but in the mean time, make your network the fastest and best it can be. Its information for people to use how they like. if you think its bullshit, just ignore it.