The "port scan" just seems to be a local connection to 127.0.0.1:8888. I don't know what purpose it serves on this page, but our government websites often use this technique to communicate with native software for digitally signing documents.
Are you seeing connection attempts to other IPs?
I looked at the website again and noticed that the request paths looked odd, one of them being `/400_random_url_with_numbers_403`. I googled that and it looks like it's part of a client-side bot detection script that's testing something, the explanation isn't very informative.
https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000138794
> These requests are caused by the bot profile to test the different browser capabilities.
> 'http://127.0.0.1:xxxx' request is a call to the localhost/client machine, which is normal when trying to protect assets like end-server using ant-bot defense. It does not have any impact regarding application page load.
This is most likely an attempt to connect to a webserver on your own device to collect data and/or do tracking.
Remember back in June when Facebook/meta got caught tracking users trough a webserver on Android phone thought Messenger and Instagram? Same thing.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940
Might also be card readers, debug servers, etc.
Could also be incompetence :D until I fixed it, deploying from my local machine rather than CD resulted in one of the baked in URLs being localhost rather than the public host on the project I'm working on now. Their local development server might just be at port 8888. Wouldn't surprise me.