Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Sitting in a Rowboat, Watching Tugboats

is not what port scanning is all about.

Ports are how your computer talks to the world, and the world talks to it. Since its how punks can get in, too, port scanners can tell you if your ports are open to anyone strolling by.

A nifty little free port scanner is located here, on a site called HackerWatch.Org. It seems to be anti-hackers (hackers in the evil sense, not the creative genius burn the midnight oil to produce technical wizardry sense). I think that they're legit, though I don't know -- I've thought for some time that if I was a black hat , I'd write free software to check for virii and such, using them as a sneaky way of getting my own stuff into people's systems.

Not suggesting that happens here, just being mildly malicious....

2 comments:

Tabor said...

Got your link from your comment on my housebuilding blog. I tried the port link and it says I am invisible to the outside world! Now that I am pushing 60, many days I feel that way.

Cerulean Bill said...

Pushing sixty? Based on the photograph, must be doing it from quite some distance away.....