Ebay is port scanning visitors to their website - and they aren't the only ones

submitted by whistlepig from blog.nem.ec

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[–]Newmug 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

What does this mean? What is "port scanning" and why is it bad?

[–]magnora7 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Basically your internet connection has "ports" and different ports are used for different communications between things. So browsing a web browser is one port, torrents are another port, OS updates might be another port, etc.

So what ebay does is when you connect, it looks at every single port you have open (and there are like 36000 total ports on every computer that could be open) and if some of them are open, it could be a potential vulnerability for them (or whoever they sell the data to) to gain entry to your computer system.

[–]Newmug 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Fuuuuucccckkk! Surely that's illegal or something?

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Apparently not