I was downloading from a popular Bit Torrent site last weekend for about 10 minutes, then I stopped because there werent enough people seeding the download. But right after that, I started getting getting a nasty barrage of incoming UDP connection attempts to port 50000. It was about 15-25 attacks from different IP addresses, all within the space of a second. Then, it would stop for 15-30 seconds before happening again... from a different set of IP addresses!
My firewall was blocking it, but it still kept happening. I restarted my computer, and it still kept happening! Finally, after about 20 minutes, I shut off my computer and DSL modem for long enough that it gave me a new IP address. After that, no problems.
So whats this all about? Is it the cable companies trying to monitor traffic on P2P sharing networks? Is it the Justice Department looking for software pirates? What the heck is going on??
Each attack would be from about a dozen different IP addresses each time. So I backtraced several of them. From a single attack, one IP would be from New York, then one from Chile, then one from Greece, then one from Texas, then one from France... and on and on. But it was definitely a coordinated effort, hitting my machine in coordinated bursts. Here are some of the IP addresses it used from one attack: 206.116.141.129, 84.68.166.150, 217.81.230.221, 146.87.193.154, 213.204.61.48, 85.229.2.120, 88.14.2.124, 172.206.199.7, 81.231.226.16, and 85.226.48.72.
I havent tried to log on to a P2P network since... is that what they are hoping for?
