Port 38440? Am I being attacked?

I'm using Zonealarm Free, and suddenly I've received almost 200 alerts over 10 minutes. The IP addresses are from all over the world, but generally the east coast of the US, Australia, and the UK. They all are being blocked from accessing UDP port 38440 on my computer.

I tried to see what uses port 38440, but google doesn't have a clue.

I'm going to put my computer to sleep now to keep it as safe as possible. Does anyone know what could be occurring?

First of all get rid of your crap zone alarm and download Comodo. free firewall.Then go take a online firewall test from gibson research and see if you have any ports open.Thats most likely incoming traffic from who knows where.

reply to post by alienstar


Iceofspades said that the firewall was blocking the packets, that is why the firewall shows the alert.


Iceofspades, it looks like that port is used by SSH, the Secure Shell, a replacement for Telnet, and that could be attempts at logging in to your computer.

As you have a firewall blocking that port (and probably do not have any program listening in that port) there is no danger.

Maybe some vulnerability was discovered on SSH (or other program that uses that port) and people are looking for computers that were not patched.

Originally posted by iceofspades
I'm using Zonealarm Free, and suddenly I've received almost 200 alerts over 10 minutes. The IP addresses are from all over the world, but generally the east coast of the US, Australia, and the UK. They all are being blocked from accessing UDP port 38440 on my computer.

I tried to see what uses port 38440, but google doesn't have a clue.

I'm going to put my computer to sleep now to keep it as safe as possible. Does anyone know what could be occurring?

it might be that a computer for some some unknown purpose is trying to find out if you have any open ports like it is trying to connect to your system it might not mean anything band. when i had macaffee all day thousands of ping requests and all kinds of other stuff.

It also might not be a direct attack at all. Hackers run UDP and IP scan on large sections of the overall internet. This does not constitute an attack in most cases. Mostly, they are looking for very specific recoveries, such as government and corporate servers with openings that they can get into.
Any firewall system you run is going to report a ton of addresses pinging off of your computer with no affect on you at all.
Think of it like looking for that "needle in the haystack". In this case, you are a piece of hay.