Some users have noticed, via their software firewall, that trace-route scans apparently coming from IBM domains occur after communicating with the World Community Grid server. These are in fact normal and not someone trying to break into your machine. These are used to measure which of several paths through the Internet give the best communication performance to your machine. The servers are located in a massive hosting center, which regularly optimizes traffic between users and the servers by shifting communications among several Internet providers, depending on the destination and trace-route measurements. You can read more about this at http://www.routescience.com/ .

edit: Also see Help for further detail.