DVDrHelp on ports

[stiltman]

For the heck of it, I just did netstat -a and the only thing I had open was my browser to dvdrhelp.com. It seems ports 1626-1768 were open and listening to the website. Seems very strange, because usually it's only 1 or 2 ports that get opened

[gmatov]

10 ports total open on my machine.

Try going to Gibson Research, www.grc.com , and having youe firewall etc tested. Scroll down to Shields Up, click "Probe my Ports". They'll tell you what is open on your machine and how vulnerable you are.

Free test and he will in the end advise you to install a free firewall. He's not trying to sell you anything.

Hell, I'd advise everybody to go there. There are trojans and the like that will open a port without your knowledge.

Cheers,

George

[sterno]

There is a big difference between a "listening" port and an established connection. Any connection has to have a port on both ends. If you have a remote machine listed then it's not a listening port. A listening port has no remote address because it's just waiting for anybody who wants to connect, and that is why they can be (but often are not) security risks.

Most web browsers will maintain a few persistent open connections to a site so that it can start loading a new page faster, but while it's loading it will open as many connections as it thinks it needs, plus if you have more windows open you might get more connections for each window. Those connections will be reused if possible, and they don't get closed until a certain amount of time has passed. That said, if it really was that entire range then it was an excessive number of connections, and I would hope that most of them were in a wait or close state.