

It bypasses my firewall, my AV, and my Pi Hole. It’s bypassing all the network security I have put in place. I do not want to allow websites to do this to my computer.

Ok first, strait up, this is creepy and I think it’s invasive. So when you visit the website, it instructs your computer, to check if these 14 ports are open, on your own computer.īy the way, thank you to Charlie Belmer for his blog post Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me which introduced me to this problem, and I only caught that post through this Hacker News posting.Īlso if you want to test this on your own, be aware that eBay only does this on the first visit to the website. If try to connect to that IP you will always be connecting the computer you are on. 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address of every computer in the world.
#Internet port scan series#
This is what I saw.Īs you can see the website has triggered a series of GET requests to 127.0.0.1 on 14 different ports.

Today I loaded up Microsoft Edge browser (version 44), enabled developer tools, looked at the network traffic and visited. No this is all done in the browser through javascript, where a website is instructing your computer to port scan itself, then report the results to the website. This isn’t someone firing off a bunch of packets at you on different ports looking to see what you have open. What it looks likeįirst of all this is not your run of the mill port scanning. This is sneaky and creepy behavior and I want to tell you about it. Some websites can and do port scan you when you visit their site.
