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port scanning is fine and should not be illegal. It's just "looking" at a house to see if there is a door and what type of key (protocol) it uses. Trying to open a connection on the other hand it's like trying to open the door. That should be considered as a violation.
Doing it from the browser is like trying to open the door from the inside . It's crappy behavior.
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Article also states civil claims were dismissed - and criminal charges are unlikely to hold.
I hope they weren't debilitated by the legal fees incurred.
https://nmap.org/book/legal-issues.html
Edit: Link to the company http://www.forensicstrategy.com/ He also has a data recovery company now http://www.myharddrivedied.com/
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Someone's never caught a case. You may not think this is true but the way the legal system works is everything is illegal. Then when they need to get you you are already guilty. Everyone else they just ignore. Crazy, right? LMAO a downvote in 3 seconds. Good old hacker news. Well, downvotes don't make you right. I'm trying to open your eyes and you downvote me. I guess that is to be expected.
"Innocent until proven guilty" suggests that everything is legal unless there is a law against it.
(No, seriously, I know people who believe that.)
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IANAL but this type of websocket port scan seems inherently different from what Shodan does. Shodan is outside your network's firewall, therefore only able to access services you've exposed to the wider web. If I understand the article, the websocket scan eBay is doing is trying to connect to local listeners on your laptop, behind your network's firewall and possibly even behind your laptop's firewall.
This is such an obvious consequence of web sockets that I wonder how anyone could have entertained the idea long enough to sober up and write the code. This is worse than letting a web page script have access to the clipboard, record mouse movements, and similar information leaks, because instead of just stealing information, now a web page can actively compromise any host on your network.
It does not, however, sound like an attacker can establish arbitrary TCP connections (at least using the technique from the article). Instead, the attacker can determine if something is listening on a port because it will take a different amount of time to negotiate/drop a connection to a port when there is a listener than when there is not a listener.
In other words, this sounds like a variant of a timing attack. As such, presumably, this particular avenue of attack can be mitigated by the browser vendor inserting a delay s.t. no information can be gleaned from how long it takes to negotiate/drop a websocket connection.
EDIT: I also wonder if it would be possible to do a similar port scan using the timing of XHR requests to localhost (e.g. http://localhost:[port]).
My kids complained today that Google Classroom isn't working. After a quick investigation, I noticed that Snort on my firewall blocked the relevant Google server due to incoming TCP port scans. Sigh.
port scanning is fine and should not be illegal. It's just "looking" at a house to see if there is a door and what type of key (protocol) it uses. Trying to open a connection on the other hand it's like trying to open the door. That should be considered as a violation.
Port scanning from an external host is fine and dandy, but doing it on localhost from the user's browser crosses the line, IMO.
This raises the question: Is port scanning without consent a violation of the CFAA? Either it is legal, and researchers should face no repercussions for doing so, or it isn't and eBay is non-compliant with CFAA. I recall hearing about someone either being arrested or convicted due to port scanning a courthouse, but it was many years ago and I can't find the case with a cursory Google search. I have to wonder what val…