Port 3265: Altav Tunnel — A Registered Ghost

What This Port Is

Port 3265 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151) — the middle tier of the port numbering system, below the well-known ports that carry HTTP, SSH, and DNS, and above the ephemeral ports that operating systems hand out on the fly for outgoing connections.

IANA lists port 3265 as assigned to Altav Tunnel, a service recorded for both TCP and UDP. ¹

That's where the trail ends.

The Ghost in the Registry

Altav Tunnel registered port 3265 with IANA and then, by every available measure, ceased to matter. There's no RFC. No product documentation. No company history. No press releases. The name "Altav" doesn't appear in any VPN history, networking archive, or industry record that has survived to the present.

This isn't unusual. IANA's registered port assignments are permanent — the registry doesn't expire old entries when companies fold, pivots happen, or products are abandoned. Port 3265 will be listed as "altav-tunnel" indefinitely, even though no Altav Tunnel has run on it in memory.

The registered ports range is full of these: names that meant something to someone once, attached to a number that now sits idle.

What Actually Runs on Port 3265

Almost certainly nothing standard. If you see traffic on port 3265 on a machine you manage, it's not Altav Tunnel — it's whatever application or service happened to bind to an available port. Operating systems and applications often choose ports in the registered range when no specific port is configured.

SANS Internet Storm Center shows minimal scanning activity on this port, which suggests it's not currently being targeted by malware or used in any coordinated way. ²

How to Check What's Using It

If port 3265 is open on your system and you want to know why:

On Linux or macOS:

# See what process is listening on port 3265
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 3265
# or
sudo lsof -i :3265

On Windows:

# Find the listening process and its PID
netstat -aon | findstr :3265
# Then look up the PID
tasklist | findstr <PID>

Why Ghost Registrations Matter

The registered ports range was designed to bring order to a chaotic system. Without it, two applications might independently choose the same port and conflict. IANA registration meant "this port belongs to this service" — a reservation system for the Internet's address space.

But reservations don't expire. Altav Tunnel reserved 3265, went dark, and left a placeholder that will never be reclaimed. Multiply that across thousands of registered ports and you get a registry that's partly a historical record and partly a museum of abandoned software.

Port 3265 is one room in that museum: a number waiting for a purpose its original owner never delivered.