These connections are part of an Internet-wide research study being conducted by computer scientists at University of California, San Diego. This research involves making benign connection attempts to public IP addresses within hospital networks. By doing this routinely, we are able to study and detect if any services are dispruted. We will never attempt to exploit security problems or change device configuration. We only receive data that is publicly visible to anyone who connects to a particular address and port.
We are using the ZMap network scanner to facilitate some of these scans. ZMap has been used for dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers. Projects our team has been involved in include:
To have your host or network excluded from future scans conducted by our team, please contact hospital-scan@sysnet.ucsd.edu and include the IP addresses or CIDR blocks you would like us to blacklist. Alternatively, you can configure your firewall to drop traffic from the IP address we use for scanning: 169.228.66.209.