What does “port scan” mean?
Internet services use “ports” so if a remote machine is thought of as an office building, then each Internet service answers the phone extension in an office. For example, the Web uses port 80, where e-mail uses ports 25 and 110. So, a port scan is like a process by which someone external calls every phone extension in the building trying to convince someone to do something they shouldn’t. A port scan is an attempt to check every port of a remote machine in an attempt to convince the remote machine to do something that it shouldn’t do or that the owner didn’t want the machine to do.
