Port 3484: GBS SnapTalk — A Ghost in the Registry

Port 3484 is registered to GBS SnapTalk Protocol (service name: gbs-stp), registered with IANA in May 2002 by Glass Bead Software, LLC.¹ The software that claimed it has been gone for years. The registration hasn't moved.

What SnapTalk Was

SnapTalk was a cross-platform instant messaging tool designed for local office networks. It ran on Windows and Mac, used peer-to-peer architecture (no server required), and let coworkers send messages and files to each other on a LAN. If the Internet went down, SnapTalk kept working — because it never needed the Internet in the first place.

It was 2002. This was genuinely useful before ubiquitous smartphones, before Slack, before everyone had a corporate email client open all day. Office chat was a real problem, and small tools like SnapTalk solved it quietly.

The software appears to have faded out of existence sometime in the mid-2000s as the market consolidated around larger platforms. The port registration it filed with IANA, however, never expires.²

The Range This Port Belongs To

Port 3484 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports aren't pre-assigned by the Internet's earliest architects like the well-known ports (0–1023) are. Instead, any organization can apply to IANA to formally register a port for their software — creating a record that says "this application uses this number, so don't step on it."

The idea is coordination. If two applications both try to use port 3484, they collide. Registration is how the Internet tries to prevent that.³

What Happens to Dead Registrations

IANA doesn't actively reclaim port registrations when software dies. The registry is append-only in practice. So port 3484 remains officially spoken for by software that no one has shipped in roughly two decades.

This is common. The registered ports range contains hundreds of entries for products that no longer exist — a quiet museum of software history, preserved in a CSV file on iana.org.⁴

What Might Actually Be on This Port Today

Because the original software is defunct, port 3484 has no typical modern use. If you see traffic on this port:

• It's likely custom or internal software that chose a "quiet" port
• It could be a misconfiguration pointing at the wrong port
• In rare cases, malware uses obscure registered ports to blend in

How to Check What's Listening

# macOS / Linux
sudo lsof -i :3484

# Linux alternative
ss -tlnp | grep 3484

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :3484

If something is listening on port 3484 on your machine and you didn't put it there, it's worth investigating.