Port Scanning

Most hackers are smart enough not to directly use their own machines to hack, especially not for e.g. port scanning. They do the dirty work from already hacked machines, sometimes a chain of multiple systems. So a traceroute usually doesn't really tell you much, other than that some grandma somewhere with cable access e.g. in the US didn't do a Windows Update, or some Linux hobbyist didn't update or secure their box. Also many scans are trojans or viruses automatically looking for other vulnerable boxes to infect.

I opened up an empty /c SMB share (SMB = "Windows Sharing" for Linux) on a Linux box some months ago just to see what would happen to it. Many viruses on infected systems out there would copied themselves to the share, e.g. into /c/windows etc, all day long. But I never saw a single human try to access the system.

I also see at least several hits a day in my Apache logs, if I have it open, pretty much all seem to be automated scans from trojan-infected systems.
 
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