What This Port Is
Port 2964 is assigned to BULLANT SRAP — a protocol developed by Bullant Technology Pty Ltd, a North Sydney software company that existed briefly at the peak of the dot-com era.
The IANA registration covers both TCP and UDP.
Port 2965 is its sibling, assigned to BULLANT RAP. The pair likely represent two variants of Bullant's thin-client protocol stack — possibly a secure and non-secure pairing, similar to how HTTPS sits alongside HTTP.
The Company Behind It
Around 2000, Bullant Technology was building something genuinely interesting: a server-centric wireless framework for delivering interactive applications to mobile devices. They called it the Zero Friction Engine — a thin-client protocol designed to push real-time, two-way application updates to wireless handsets before the infrastructure to do that reliably even existed.
The company raised over $55 million from serious investors: Intel, J.P. Morgan Partners, and First Data. They announced a strategic alliance with Infosys. They registered IANA port numbers for their protocols, a signal of intent to ship real infrastructure.
Then they asked their investors for another $20 million. The investors said no. Bullant went into administration.
The ports survived. The protocol didn't.
What "Registered" Means Here
Port 2964 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific applications and services, but the assignments carry no enforcement. Any application can listen on any registered port — IANA registration is a coordination mechanism, not a lock.
In Bullant's case, the registration is an artifact. No active software ships BULLANT SRAP today. If you see traffic on port 2964, it isn't Bullant's protocol — it's something else that wandered onto an empty port.
What's Actually on Port 2964 Today
If you see traffic on this port, it's almost certainly one of:
- A custom internal application that picked an "unused" port at random
- A misconfigured service that drifted from its intended port
- A port scanner checking for open services
There are no known active services, malware families, or widely-deployed applications that specifically use port 2964.
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something is listening, the process ID will tell you what it is.
Why Ghost Ports Matter
The registered port space is full of entries like this — protocols from companies that no longer exist, standards that were drafted but never shipped, experiments that ended before launch. They're not harmful, but they're also not clean.
Ghost ports matter because they create false confidence. An administrator checking whether port 2964 is "safe" to open finds an IANA registration and assumes legitimacy. The registration says nothing about current use or risk. It only says: once, someone had plans.
The Internet's port registry is part technical infrastructure, part archaeology.
Apakah halaman ini membantu?