Port 2485: Net Objects1 — A Registered Port for a Forgotten Product

What Port 2485 Is

Port 2485 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151), and it has a name in the IANA registry: netobjects1, assigned to a service called Net Objects1.¹

That service belongs to NetObjects Fusion, a web design application that had its moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The company behind it, NetObjects, Inc., sold the product to Web.com in 2001. Web.com sold it back to a re-established NetObjects in 2009.² The software still technically exists, but it is rarely encountered in the wild. The port it reserved at IANA has long since been forgotten by the people who reserved it.

The Registered Port Range

Ports 1024–49151 are called registered ports. The idea was that software vendors could apply to IANA and claim a port number for their product, creating a predictable address others could rely on.

In practice, this worked well for protocols that became infrastructure. For niche commercial applications, it produced a graveyard of registrations for products that have come and gone, while the port numbers remain on the books indefinitely. Port 2485 is one of those.³

A Brief Security History

In September 2003, a trojan called Backdoor.Djump was documented opening TCP ports 21009 and 2485 on infected machines. It used these ports to create unauthorized remote access.⁴

This is worth knowing for one reason: if you see unexpected traffic on port 2485, there is no legitimate modern service that would explain it. NetObjects Fusion is not running on your server. Something else is.

How to Check What Is Listening on Port 2485

Linux / macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 2485
ss -tlnp | grep 2485

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :2485

Windows:

# Show listening ports and their process IDs
netstat -ano | findstr :2485

# Find the process name from a PID
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If anything shows up, it warrants investigation. There is no common legitimate reason for a modern system to be listening here.

Why Unassigned and Defunct Ports Matter

Every port in the registered range has a story. Some are critical infrastructure, handling millions of connections per second. Others are registrations from companies that no longer exist, for software no one runs, for protocols that were never widely implemented.

The port numbering system has no expiration dates. A registration from 1997 stays on the books in 2025. This is not a flaw exactly; it is just how the system accumulated history. Understanding which ports have real active services versus defunct registrations is part of knowing what traffic on your network means.

Port 2485 means nothing if you see it. That is its honest story.