Online port scanner
See your estate the way someone outside it does. Point the scanner at a host you control and get the open ports, the services behind them and the versions they admit to - graded, kept, and watched for the day any of it changes.
Watched, not just checked
This is one scan of one layer, run once. In AYAsec the same check runs on a schedule across every asset you own, and you are told the day a grade drops.
Six reasons to scan your own ports
A port scan answers a question no inventory can: what is this estate actually willing to talk to a stranger about?
01
Find the services you forgot you were running
Estates accumulate. A database opened for a migration three years ago, a staging box nobody decommissioned, a management port exposed during an incident and never closed again. A port scan from outside is the only reliable way to see what your own infrastructure actually answers on.
02
Check that a firewall rule does what it says
A rule is an intention; an open port is a fact. Scanning from outside your perimeter tests the intention against reality, and catches the cases where a change landed on the wrong interface, the wrong environment, or never took effect at all.
03
Check a supplier you have the right to test
Due diligence usually arrives as a questionnaire, answered once and filed. Where your contract gives you the right to test, a scan tells you what a supplier exposes in practice rather than what they wrote about themselves - and on a schedule, it tells you the day that changes.
04
Confirm a decommission really happened
Servers are retired on paper long before they stop listening. Scanning those hosts after a migration or a datacentre exit tells you which are still answering, and stops you paying for - and being liable for - infrastructure you believe is gone.
05
Watch an acquisition's attack surface
Inheriting a company means inheriting its exposure, usually without documentation. Scanning the domains you have taken on gives you an inventory built from evidence rather than from whatever the previous team remembered to write down.
06
Produce evidence an auditor will accept
"We closed that port" is an assertion. A dated scan showing the port closed is evidence. Keeping the history means the question of when something changed has an answer that does not depend on anyone's memory. That is a subject of its own.
Know the day your attack surface moves
A scan you run by hand tells you about one afternoon. Exposure does not arrive on an afternoon - it arrives when a deploy opens a port nobody reviewed, when a rule is loosened for a debugging session and left that way, when a supplier changes a default.
Scheduled scans turn that into a difference you are told about: this port was not open last week, this version went backwards, this host appeared on a domain you thought was retired. Continuous monitoring across servers and endpoints is a separate capability.
Step 01
Name the target
A hostname or a domain you control, added to your AYAsec account. Ownership is checked before anything is dispatched - AYAsec will not schedule scans against infrastructure you have not demonstrated control of, and proving it takes one DNS record. The quick scan above skips this: no account, no verification, just IP rate-limiting and a rule that the target has to be a public address.
Step 02
Choose the depth
The default profile covers 100 of the most commonly targeted TCP ports - the web, mail, file-sharing, database and remote-access services most estates run, from FTP, SSH and HTTP/S through SMTP, MySQL, PostgreSQL and RDP. Widen it to the full 65,535 when you want certainty rather than speed, or narrow it to a list you care about.
Step 03
Read the result
Open ports arrive with the service and version behind each one, matched against known CVEs, and graded so the queue is ordered before anyone starts triaging it.
A result you can act on, not just read
Save the scan to an AYAsec account and it produces three things the free quick scan above doesn't.
01
The graded report
Open ports with the service and version behind each, scored A+ to F so the worst of it is at the top rather than somewhere in a list.
02
The CVE match
Detected versions are matched against known vulnerabilities, so an outdated service arrives already tied to what is published about it. A CVE is a publicly catalogued security flaw with a unique identifier - matching your versions against that catalogue is one layer of attack surface management.
03
The export
PDF for the people who need a document, and the API for the systems that need the data. The same scan, in whichever shape the reader needs.
Questions before you scan
Nmap has been the reference port scanner since 1997 and remains the tool the rest are measured against. AYAsec runs it for you and keeps what it finds.
What may I scan?
Infrastructure you own or are contracted to test. The quick scan above doesn't verify that for you - it only rate-limits by IP and refuses to target anything but a public address. Add the target to an AYAsec account instead, and control is verified before anything scheduled runs: a legal boundary as much as a practical one, since an unverified scan is of no use to you as evidence either.
Will a scan disrupt the target?
A standard TCP connect scan is ordinary traffic and is not disruptive. Deeper options are noisier by nature: aggressive timing, full 65,535-port sweeps and UDP probes all generate more load and are more likely to be logged by whatever is watching.
Why does the scan show fewer ports than I expected?
Filtered is not the same as closed. A firewall that drops packets silently leaves ports indistinguishable from a host that is simply not listening. The distinction matters when you are proving something is shut rather than merely unreachable from where you scanned.
How is this different from running Nmap myself?
The scan itself is not the hard part. Keeping a history, scanning on a schedule, correlating versions against CVEs, alerting when a result changes and holding evidence an auditor will accept - that is the part that does not survive being a command someone runs occasionally.
Do you keep the results?
Not the quick scan above - it lives in memory for about fifteen minutes so you can read it once, then it's gone. That's a deliberate privacy choice, not a limitation: nobody but you ever sees that scan, and you can download the full result before it expires. Add the target to an AYAsec account instead, and every scan is kept - a series that is a record of how your exposure moved. Retention depends on your plan.
Keep the history, not just the result
Run the full scanner against your own estate, on a schedule, with every result retained and every change flagged.
More free security scanners for HTTP, TLS and DNS
Ports are one of five scored layers. The others each answer a different question: