Anti-Censorship Efforts And Port Scanning

scubacuda writes "According to Wired, the University of Toronto's Internet Censorship Explorer permits people test the limits of national and organizational Internet-blocking schemes. Users enter a target URL (and a country), and the software then scans the ports of available servers in that country, looking for open ones to connect on from behind that country's firewall. Many consider port scanning a gray area, as it's often used by various hackers to find vulnerabilies that can be exploited."

Comments

missing country

[GLowder]

Darn, Iraq isn't listed. Just trying to do my part for the effort.

Block that

[UVABlows]

So now the countries will just block that site too. How useful.

Re:Block that

[bheerssen]

Can you see a country blocking microsoft?

There's always hope.

Portscanning

[Anonymous Coward]

Portscanning finds things that are not meant to be open.

For example, IIS web services that MS "trusts" enough to give full system access to.

Re:Tool

[Mouth of Sauron]

When was the last time someone was murdered with a scalpel?

Sniff my ports, please!

[L. VeGas]

It's about the only action I'm getting these days.

thanks,
HAL

Re:Being an ICE developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Anne Malle.. You so silly

Your troll would have got modded up if you said CSIS and RCMP instead of FBI and CIA.

Why would the FBI or CIA be in toronto? It's just silly.

Plus, I'm pretty sure it's Anna Malle. (Annamalle..animal) She's probably the reigning double penetration porn queen, besides Kate Fent, of course.

Scanning is.. well, interesting.

[pclminion]

I get hundreds of scans per day. I don't "take offense" at this or get my panties crunched over it. In fact, it's interesting to see what the latest "craze" is -- some weeks, the LPD port is really popular, other times it's port 1433 (sql slammer). A lot of the time I'm aware of a new vulnerability even before it's widely known, because I start seeing people hitting those ports.

All my firewall events go into a DB, which I query daily. I have a set of reports showing things like average scans per second per host, most popular ports, most popular times of day, etc. If I see something incredibly suspicious I suppose I would try to investigate further -- but most of the time I just have a good time watching people bounce off my firewall.

If you don't want people sending packets to various ports on your box, perhaps you should disconnect it from the Internet.

Re:Tool

[unicron]

In America, we've realized for the most part that it's not the tool, but the person behind it. If you take away my knife, I'll just huck rocks at you, it makes no difference.