clarification, please

Reading the thread about someone being scanned it came about that it might not be legal??? I understood that it was okay to run a scanner, and have just to see them work, and ping people who hit your firewalls, etc. as long as you don't enter.
Someone posted a reply that scanning was comparable to standing outside someones houseand deciding how you were going to break in-I thought it was comparable to walking down the street and looking at all the different houses.
Can I legally bombard someone who scans me repeatedley, or would I be out of line-I wouldn't be comforatable calling an isp because of a breach on my home computer(correction-attempted breach) Obviously I am about to be set straight and that is what i am looking for. Too many of the things I have read never explain the legalities of different actions, so I appreciate all your feedback

you are correct in your assumption. There are currently no laws stating that you cant do port scans on persons computers.

Quote:

---

Port scanning is an ideological ambiguity within the computer industry. While usually considered malicious, port scanning is often used by system administrators to diagnose problems on their own network. While most private organizations prohibit the activity, there are currently no state or federal laws that specifically address it.

---

the full story can be found here

Hope this helps

if you attack someones computer your guilty of attacking someones computer period.

with most ISPs scanning of the computers of others is against the user agreement. if you report them they can loose their account. if you "blast" them (whatever you mean by that) you are guilty of whatever it is you do. if by blast you mean attack them then you've broken the law while they may or may not have only broken a user agreement with their isp.

by "blast" I mean continually (5minutes) scan and ping them so they know I am paying attention-which until now thought was what I was supposed to do

Thanks Spyrus-I'll send my scanner off my desktop into my old toys folder- I am here to learn, not to burn

if you do that they can claim your attempting to proform a denial of service attack.

let me ask you this, are they doing an all ports scan and have you done a whois on the ip address?

well this sort of behaviour will definately get you flagged. legal or not, some companies may think it in their best interests to keep an eye on you, especially if you are contineously scanning ip ranges and trying to connect to any ftp or telnet service etc. that you find.

I only do it when my firewall alerts say I am being scanned-before I started doing whosis I used to scan my isp!!! It is hard getting good solid info on a lot of this stuff and that is why I returned to college this semester-To learn in a structured manner instead of jumping around radomly though this site has helped me an awful lot

you can try sending them a message using net send. if they don't have a firewall and they have messanger service running it would really freak them out. net send messaging is considered to fall under the catogory of instant messaging which is how come spammers are getting away with it.

just:

NET SEND xx.xxx.xxx.xx leave me the hell alone

you'll get a message say it was successfull or not. just make sure its not a ligit scan first. im not sure what your calling a scan.

does it give you the ip address and all the ports its scanning?

it gives the ports and the ip- I don't know "net send"

open a dos prompt and type the example i gave you putting in the ip addy in place of the Xs.

there can be many ligitamite scans made. what ports are the hitting you don't want to jump to conclusions