Port Scan! Legal?

Of late, we have been noticing a lot of port-scans on our server farm. Usually it was one or two or maybe half-a-dozen a week or something, of the last one-week, it has jumped up to 30-40 a day.

Needless to say, that had our attention, albeit we see no reason to be overly alarmed (the network gear protecting us is in pretty good shape) and we have a 24/7 monitoring service on our IDS/IPS/Firewall.

Upon analyzing the IPs, we notice them to be coming from 4-5 data-centers. Surprisingly enough NOT from DLS customers, etc.

My question is in two parts:

1. Is port scanning legal (yes, our data center is in the US)? If it is illegal - can anyone refer me to some law document?

2. Would a data-center take action against a port scan if logs were dispatched to them?

TIA.

 

 

 

 

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