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    Batten Down Those Ports

    By
    Brett Glass
    -
    August 27, 2003
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      With worms such as Blaster prowling the Net, every user ought to know the ways a computer may be exposing itself to attacks. One of the simplest but most vital tests you can do to determine potential vulnerabilities is to find out which ports your PC has open to the outside world.

      ZIFFPAGE TITLEWhats a port

      ?”>

      Whats a port?

      Computers that speak TCP/IP obtain services from one another via “handles” known as ports. Many ports are preassigned to specific network services, such as HTTP (port 80) and FTP (port 21); these are called well-known ports. There are two kinds of ports: TCP ports and UDP ports.

      TCP ports are used by the Transmission Control Protocol, which allows a server to conduct a conversation, or session, with another machine. When your computer wants to request a page from a Web server, it sends a packet to that machine indicating that it wants to talk to TCP port 80 (the well-known port through which most Web servers serve up pages). The server, seeing that youve asked for port 80, connects your computer to the Web server program, which—of the many programs running on the machine—is the one that specializes in delivering Web pages. The conversation between the machines may be brief or may continue indefinitely.

      Brett Glass
      Brett Glass has more than 20 years of experience designing, building,writing about, and crash-testing computer hardware and software. (A born'power user,' he often stresses products beyond their limits simply bytrying to use them.) A consultant, author, and programmer based inLaramie, Wyoming, Brett obtained his Bachelor of Science degree inElectrical Engineering from the Case Institute of Technology and his MSEEfrom Stanford. He plans networks, builds and configures servers, outlinestechnical strategies, designs embedded systems, hacks UNIX, and writeshighly optimized assembly language.During his rather eclectic career, Brett has written portions of the codeand/or documentation for such widely varied products as Borland's Pascal'toolboxes' and compilers, Living Videotext's ThinkTank, Cisco Systemsrouters and terminal servers, Earthstation diskless workstations, andTexas Instruments' TMS380 Token Ring networking chipset. His articleshave appeared in nearly every major computer industry publication.When he's not writing, consulting, speaking, or cruising the Web insearch of adventure, he may be playing the Ashbory bass, teachingInternet courses for LARIAT (Laramie's community network and Internetusers' group), cooking up a storm, or enjoying 'extreme'-ly spicy ethnicfood.To mail Brett, visit his Web form.

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