my firewall keeps giving me a window/warning that sez "intrusion attempt blocked type: port scan" . what exactley is a port scan agen?? and are they dangorus and whos doing it? and how do they work and what are they for? any help greatley apresheated.


also now on a competley different tangent... im am into lossless music and its helltrying to find it on limewire because thers so many idiots out there that share wavs that were made from 128k mp3s . if its not to much troble if any one has any of the folowing songs in .WAV format and you ripped them from the origanal cd could you please somehow send them to me (like do the direct conect feture in LW or somthing ) or label them with somthing completley random ,like put the word "KETCHUP" after the title or somthing so i can serch 4 and find them esiley. alsow i know asking like this might be bending the rules a little but moast of the songs i allredy have or had on a cd that got scrtched or i had it on cassett so dling them would be the same as a fair use backup copy .

dire strates-"money for nothing" the long verson, lenard skinard sweet home alabama, smash mouth -all star, smash mouth -holiday in my head,chumbawamba-on ebay,BTO taking care of business,don henley -dirty laundry,real mccoy -run away and the the cars-lets go thers lots more but i dont want to push it ...thanks

Dear cathodraytube

What is a port scan? First, you have to know what a "port" is and how many of them there are.

In a windows PC connected to the internet there are 65,536 (numbered from 0 – 65535) software ports, which enable you to send and receive e-mails, surf the net, update your software and various other things too numerous to mention. Up until recently, when you purchased a new PC, or installed windows, whenever you went onto the internet a majority of these ports would be open by internet enabled windows apps and by windows itself.

In the early days of the internet this was not a bad thing but since the advent of “worms” (virus type programs that hunt out and crawl into open port PCs on the internet) and hackers (people looking to access PCs without the user’s permission) open ports became a real issue.

Note that a port has two natural states, open or closed, a hacker will scan your PC to find out which ports are open, thus vulnerable to attack, and which are closed. Unfortunately, both open and closed ports respond to scanning and send back information to the hacker detailing how susceptible to attack you machine really is.

So what is a port scan, it is when an organisation or hacker scans the internet looking for PCs with open ports, for whatever reason (which usually does you no good). Your firewall is alerting you to the fact that your PC is being scanned or under attack, if your firewall is capable then it will be able to track where the scan/attack is coming from.

An installed firewall introduces a third state to your ports, "stealthed". A stealthed port does not respond to scanning and so is invisible to the hacker (or scanning organisation). Therefore, if all your ports are stealthed (all 65,536 of them) then your PC is effectively invisible on the internet and is less likely to be attacked by a hacker or worm.

Finally, I imagine each open port to be the equivalent of an open backdoor in your home, which beckons to any passing stranger inviting him to come in. Installing a firewall cancels the invitations, closes and camouflages all the back doors so that they can no longer be seen.

This is the ultimate goal.




UK Bob

thank you , that clears it up a little , i allredy had a basic idia about ports and how they work but that makes it a lot ezer to understand. verry good explanation.

ok now i have a new problem , i recentley installed windows 98se on my old (circa 1996) PC that was windows 95 , and then the modem wouldent work ,windows dident even detect it . i fugured out it was the drivers. companey that made modem and drivers went out of bussiness...self explanatory what happened from there...so i bot a new modem and it installed fine and has correct drivers , but now the computer crashes and restarts every time i try to dial in . what is wrong now??? im not shur but the proceccer might be too slow for the new modem. cpu is 100MHz i think and minimum requirement for modem is 166MHz i think (so sez the box) could this be it ??? the pc has 32 mb of ram and win 98se and was made in 1995 or 1996.