What Port 3013 Is
Port 3013 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151), the middle tier of the port number system. These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services, applications, and companies — not reserved for well-known protocols, but not random either. Someone asked for this port. IANA said yes. The paperwork exists.
In this case, the paperwork belongs to Gilat Sky Surfer, listed in the IANA registry for both TCP and UDP, with a contact of Yossi Gal at Gilat. 1
The Company Behind It
Gilat Satellite Networks was an Israeli company that became a significant player in two-way satellite Internet access during the late 1990s. Their Sky Surfer product was a consumer satellite service — broadband from space, delivered to a dish on your roof, at a time when most people were still on dial-up.
In 2000, Gilat partnered with Microsoft to launch what would become StarBand, one of the first consumer satellite broadband services in the United States. 2 3 The Sky Surfer name and the port registered to it are relics of that era — when satellite Internet seemed like the future, before cable and fiber made it a niche.
Gilat Satellite Networks still exists as a company focused on enterprise and government satellite connectivity. 4 But Sky Surfer, as a consumer product, is long gone. Port 3013 is what it left behind.
What This Means for the Port System
The IANA registered port list contains thousands of entries like this one. A company registers a port for a product. The product gets discontinued, the company pivots, or the whole thing gets absorbed into something else. The port registration stays.
This is one of the quiet realities of the port system: the registry doesn't expire. There's no mechanism to automatically reclaim ports when services die. The result is a registry that is partly a live directory and partly an archaeological record.
Port 3013 is almost certainly not being used by anything calling itself Gilat Sky Surfer today. If you see traffic on port 3013, it's either some application that chose the number arbitrarily, or something worth investigating.
Checking What's Actually Using This Port
If port 3013 appears open on a system you manage, don't assume it's benign because it has a registry entry. The registration is effectively abandoned.
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
These commands will show you the actual process holding the port open, which is the only answer that matters.
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