The Art of Port Scanning

This paper details many of the techniques used to determine what ports (or similar protocol abstraction) of a host are listening for connections. These ports represent potential communication channels. Mapping their existence facilitates the exchange of information with the host, and thus it is quite useful for anyone wishing to explore their networked environment, including hackers. Despite what you have heard from the media, the Internet is NOT all about TCP port 80.

Anyone who relies exclusively on the WWW for information gathering is likely to gain the same level of proficiency as your average AOLer, who does the same. This paper is also meant to serve as an introduction to and ancillary documentation for a coding project I have been working on. It is a full featured, robust port scanner which (I hope) solves some of the problems I have encountered when dealing with other scanners and when working to scan massive networks.