What is a Port Scanner and How Does it Work?

Cyber Security
#1

port scanner is a computer program that checks network ports for one of three possible statuses – open, closed, or filtered.

Port scanners are valuable tools in diagnosing network and connectivity issues. However, attackers use port scanners to detect possible access points for infiltration and to identify what kinds of devices you are running on the network, like firewalls
A port scanner sends a network request to connect to a specific TCP or UDP port on a computer and records the response.

So what a port scanner does is send a packet of network data to a port to check the current status. If you wanted to check to see if your web server was operating correctly, you would check the status of port 80 on that server to make sure it was open and listening.

The status helps network engineers diagnose network issues or application connectivity issues, or helps attackers find possible ports to use for infiltration into your network.

A port is a virtual location where networking communication starts and ends (in a nutshell). For a more in-depth explanation, we need to establish a little background information. There are two kinds of network ports on each computer (65,536 of each for a total of 131,082 network ports):

  • TCP and UDP

Each computer has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is how the network knows which computer to send packets to. If you send a packet to the IP address, the computer knows what port to route the packet to based on the application or packet contents. Each service running on the computer needs to “listen” on a designated port.

The first 1023 TCP ports are the well-known ports reserved for applications like FTP(21), HTTP(80), or SSH(22) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) reserves these points to keep them standardized.

TCP ports 1024 – 49151 are available for use by services or applications, and you can register them with IANA, so they are considered semi-reserved. Ports 49152 and higher are free to use.