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Port 33434

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

Recently, in a few email lists, I saw a lot of traffic concerning packets destined to port 33434. Several firewall operators were confused as to why their network was being scanned on that port.

Solution

Port 33434 is one of the ports that traceroute uses. Traceroute is a utility for tracing out a network path between two hosts. However, use of traceroute does not necessarily indicate an attack, nor the attempt to gather information for mounting an attack. Traceroute, and thus port 33434, is seeing increasing use as part of web server global load balancing strategies. These load balancing systems traceroute their way to your system to try to determine which network of servers can most quickly answer web queries from your network. While these systems can be inconvenient they are innocuous.