I have some sensitive data on several of our office machines. We just moved to a new facility with a static ip. I have our internet connection going through a netgear firewall/router and I have port 22 forwarding directly to my box (running RH7.3).

Do I need to worry about attacks through port 22? Is it pretty secure? Do I need to check the ssh/sshd version (are there some that are more vulnerable than others?)? Is the netgear firewall/router safe for keeping out intruders?

I have ip chains disabled on most of the machines if that makes any difference.

Thanks

You probably want to make sure that your sshd is current and patched. In addition, filter your incoming ssh connections to only known sources.

Is there another way to filter incoming ssh instead of using the host.allow?? and if so, is it possible to filter by both IP and MAC address as well?

You can filter connections with iptables.