Sunday, May 31, 2020

eBay Chick-fil-A Citibank what are you doing?

 A LOT of port scanning occurs on the Internet.  A LOT.
The Internet accesses things via an IP address and the port at that IP address.
To get an HTTP web page you try to connect to the IP address on port 80. (A standard port number but it can be changed)
 So port scanning tries all the IP addresses and all of the 65536 TCP ports and all 65536 UDP ports.
This takes a lot of time and many "services" run these port scans and publish the results. If you watch a newly connected PC to the Internet it takes a few seconds until it will be port scanned.
 Firewalls, router settings, Windows Defender, IP tables, and many other defenses block these scans.

 It has come to light recently that eBay, Citibank, Chick-fil-A and many other sites will scan your devices to find open ports INSIDE your home network and send the results back to that site. Now all those sites know more about your network defenses and network capabilities than you.

 An explanation: Fraud detection. Most of the reported ports connect to remote access services like TeamViewer, VNC, etc. Criminals use these services to commit fraud. Use a user's open eBay connection to buy items using the user's credentials.

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