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Anti-Censorship Efforts And Port Scanning

Posted by timothy on from the poke-poke-ouch dept.

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."

6 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Block that by UVABlows · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --

    <high-level position here>
    <name of stupid small company here>

    1. Re:Block that by bheerssen · · Score: 4, Funny

      Can you see a country blocking microsoft?

      There's always hope.

      --
      (Score: -1, Stupid)
  2. Portscanning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:Tool by Mouth+of+Sauron · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  4. Sniff my ports, please! by L.+VeGas · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    thanks,
    HAL

    --
    Best Windows Freeware
  5. Scanning is.. well, interesting. by pclminion · · Score: 4, Funny
    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.