More Info:

Determines if TCP port 25 for SMTP is open to the public. While some ports such as HTTP and HTTPS are required to be open to the public to function properly, more sensitive services such as SMTP should be restricted to known IP addresses.

Risk Level

Medium

Address

Security

Compliance Standards

HITRUST, GDPR, SOC2, NISTCSF, PCIDSS, FedRAMP

Triage and Remediation

Remediation

To remediate the SMTP Port Should Not Be Open misconfiguration in GCP using the GCP console, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to the GCP console (https://console.cloud.google.com/).
  2. Navigate to the Cloud Console.
  3. Select the project where the VM instance is running.
  4. In the left-hand menu, click on “Compute Engine” and then “VM instances”.
  5. Locate the instance that has the open SMTP port and click on the name of the instance.
  6. In the details pane, click on the “Edit” button at the top of the page.
  7. Scroll down to the “Firewall” section and click on “Networking interfaces”.
  8. Locate the “default-allow-smtp” rule and click on the trash icon to delete the rule.
  9. Click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to apply the changes.

Once you have completed these steps, the SMTP port should no longer be open on the VM instance.

Additional Reading: