For a more in-depth explanation, we need to establish a little background information. What is a Port?Ī port is a virtual location where networking communication starts and ends (in a nutshell). The status helps network engineers diagnose network issues or application connectivity issues, or helps attackers find possible ports to use for infiltration into your network. If you wanted to check to see if your web server was operating correctly, you would check the status of port 80 on that server to make sure it was open and listening. So what a port scanner does is send a packet of network data to a port to check the current status. “This really opened my eyes to AD security in a way defensive work never did.”Ī port scanner sends a network request to connect to a specific TCP or UDP port on a computer and records the response.