What This Port Is
Port 2965 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151) and carries an official IANA assignment: BULLANT RAP, service name bullant-rap, registered for both TCP and UDP. The assignee on record is Michael Cahill.1
Bullant was an Australian software company. RAP, in their context, almost certainly stood for some form of remote access or administration protocol. Beyond that, the historical record thins quickly. The company registered the port, the Internet kept moving, and the protocol never became anything you'd encounter in the wild today.
What the Registered Range Means
Ports 1024–49151 are registered ports, meaning any organization or individual can apply to IANA to claim one for a specific service. Registration is not enforcement. Nothing prevents you from running any software on port 2965. Registration just means IANA has noted an intended use in their database and, theoretically, other software should avoid using that number for something else.
Unlike well-known ports (0–1023), registered ports don't require elevated privileges to open on most operating systems. Any user-level process can bind to port 2965.
Why Abandoned Assignments Matter
IANA does not reclaim port assignments when companies shut down or protocols are abandoned. This is intentional: reclaiming a port creates the risk of collision if the old software still exists somewhere in a data center. So ports like 2965 stay assigned in the registry indefinitely, a small monument to software that once existed.
This is one reason the registered port range sometimes feels noisy. Roughly 48,000 registered ports exist. Most of the Internet runs on a few hundred of them.
If You See Traffic on Port 2965
If you're investigating activity on port 2965, it is almost certainly not BULLANT RAP — that software hasn't been in active use for decades. More likely candidates:
- Custom or proprietary application traffic
- A developer running a service on an uncontested port
- Malware or unauthorized software choosing a port that won't conflict with standard services
To see what's listening on this port on your system:
macOS / Linux:
Windows:
The output will show the process ID. Cross-reference that against your running processes to identify what's actually using it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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