Hi I was thinking about security etc

Just wondering if their was any way to determine the difference between a genuine request for a service (eg HTTP on port 80) or a scan from say nmap?

is their anyway to seperate the two??

Chris

no not realy, the only was see is only to listen, or respond so the requests that you are expecting, IE, if your broswing the web then youd expect incoming trafic thru and outgoing thru port 80, if there are no web browsers active, then anything thru port 80 could be a scan, but its less liky to be genuine (unless your runing a web server, or some server people conect to thru that port)

other then that, i have no clue about how to detect whats real and whats not, if nmap is half the program i think it is tehn you shoulent be able to tell the difrence, it would just seem odd that somone was sending you all this stuff

Just wondering if their was any way to determine the difference between a genuine request for a service (eg HTTP on port 80) or a scan from say nmap? is their anyway to seperate the two??
Yes, provided you use the right tools. A HTTP request is made and built following a defined structure. The minimum you should be able to ngrep packets payload for in a HTTP request is the "$REQUESTTYPE HTTP/$VERSION" header. An IDS like Snort is quite capable determining an Nmap scan from an urlencoded double backslash attack or a genuine request. Of course it does more than only grep for a string.

yeah just so everybody knows this is just a out of interest kind of post. What about other ports? say ssh or email ports? hmmm