Port 3445: monp — A Ghost in the Registry

What Port 3445 Is

Port 3445 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that vendors and developers have formally claimed with IANA — the organization that coordinates Internet naming and numbering — to reserve a port for a specific protocol.

IANA's registry lists port 3445 as monp (Media Object Network Protocol), assigned to a company called Aethercloud, with a contact named Ron Herardian. The registration dates to approximately 2002.

Beyond that entry, there is nothing. No RFC. No specification. No documented implementation. No software known to use it.

A Ghost Registration

Port reservations don't expire. Once a name and port number are in the IANA registry, they stay there indefinitely — even if the protocol they represent was never finished, never published, or never deployed.

Port 3445 is one of many ghost registrations in the registry: a name attached to a number, with no protocol behind it. Whatever "Media Object Network Protocol" was intended to become in 2002, it never became it publicly. The reservation remains.

This isn't unusual. Hundreds of registered ports point to protocols that exist only as an IANA entry — ideas that stalled, companies that folded, or projects that shipped under a different name.

What You Might See on This Port

Because port 3445 has no widely deployed service, traffic here is almost always one of three things:

• Opportunistic scanning — automated scanners sweep large port ranges; 3445 gets caught in the net
• Malware or custom tools — adversaries sometimes pick obscure registered ports precisely because they have no legitimate traffic to blend into
• Private applications — developers occasionally use registered-but-dormant ports for internal services, knowing they're unlikely to conflict with anything

SANS Internet Storm Center shows occasional low-level scanning activity against port 3445, consistent with broad Internet sweeps rather than targeted exploitation.¹

How to Check What's on This Port

If you see traffic on port 3445 and want to know what's generating it:

On Linux/macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 3445
sudo ss -tlnp sport = :3445

# Or with lsof
sudo lsof -i :3445

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3445

Then look up the PID in Task Manager, or use:

tasklist /FI "PID eq <pid>"

If nothing is listening and you're seeing inbound traffic, it's likely an Internet scanner that found your IP.

Why Unassigned and Dormant Ports Matter

The registered port range contains 48,128 ports. Thousands of them look like port 3445 — claimed, named, and never used. This isn't a flaw in the system; it's a consequence of how the Internet grows. People reserve space for ideas. Some ideas ship. Many don't.

What this means practically:

• You can't assume a registered port is safe to use for your own service — someone else technically claimed it
• You can't assume traffic on a registered port is the protocol it's registered for — especially for dormant registrations
• When auditing your network, any process listening on port 3445 deserves scrutiny, because there's no legitimate widely-deployed service that should be there

The registered port range is part map, part archaeology.