I'm trying to troubleshoot a bug on our Azure worker role where we occasionally get the error "Unable to read data from the transport connection: An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine". This error occurs when we are connecting to outside resources like google auth servers.

A few people have recommended disabling the firewall\antivirus on the server. I'm just wondering what kind of security risk we would take by doing this. The server doesn't have iis installed but would it be vulnerable to hacking without the firewall? Thanks