Yeah sorry about that. I upvoted your answer, but the question apparently had to be reworked for it to be acceptable here - I'm still not super familiar with the guidelines for all the different CS areas on Stack Exchange. I actually was unsure about changing the accepted answer, so I had to ask about what I should do here on meta.stackoverflow.com

Any good resources you know?

I think this might warrant its own question, but is there a good way I can see these vulnerabilities for myself? I want to forward a port to a service and then try connecting to my port from the outside (simulating an attempted attack) basically trying to see these vulnerabilities firsthand. I fear most of my understanding of IT security is lacking because I am defending against a boogeyman - I don't know how exactly the attacks work so I'm just relying on what other ppl say I should do in order to protect myself.

Also yes, UPnP was enabled, so I disabled it. I think that was the issue.

Can you elaborate on the security risks, other than that people can connect to the services listening on those ports? Are there risks to my machine beyond the scope of those services?

@Adnan Thank you for the revision - I think that more accurately expresses what I was asking. With the revision does it still need reworking?