What Runs on Port 1560
Port 1560 is officially registered in the IANA port registry for ASCI-RemoteSHADOW (protocol name: asci-val), a remote monitoring and management protocol developed by Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc.1
Both TCP and UDP can use port 1560, though the protocol appears designed primarily for TCP connections.
The Company Behind It
Advanced Systems Concepts (ASCI) was founded in 1981 in Hoboken, New Jersey, as a software engineering company specializing in "Strategic System Software Management Solutions."2 RemoteSHADOW was one of their products for remote system monitoring—the kind of tool that datacenter operators in the 1980s and 1990s used to keep an eye on servers.
The company is now known as ActiveBatch (after their flagship product), focusing on workload automation and job scheduling. RemoteSHADOW itself has faded into history.
Why You Probably Don't See This Port
Port 1560 belongs to the registered ports range (1024-49151). These ports are assigned by IANA to specific services, but registration doesn't mean the service is widely used—or even still exists.
IANA registered thousands of ports in the 1980s and 1990s to vendors who requested them. Many of those products are gone now. The port numbers remain reserved anyway, like gravestones marking where something once lived.
If you see port 1560 open on a modern network, it's either:
- An extremely old system still running legacy software
- A different application that chose to use this port unofficially
- Possibly malware (port 1560 has been observed in historical malware databases3, though this doesn't mean current activity is malicious)
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
These commands show if anything is actually listening on port 1560, and what process owns it.
What Registered Ports Mean
The registered ports range (1024-49151) was created so vendors could request official assignments for their protocols. You submit an application to IANA, describe your service, and if approved, you get a port number.
The problem: IANA doesn't revoke registrations when products die. Port 1560 is still assigned to RemoteSHADOW even though almost nobody uses it anymore. This is true for thousands of registered ports—they're reserved for services that existed once, and maybe still exist somewhere, but aren't part of the active Internet anymore.
The well-known ports (0-1023) are different—those are for fundamental protocols that the Internet depends on. Registered ports like 1560 are more like reserved seats at a theater where most of the audience never showed up.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
Most ports in the registered range have no official assignment at all. Applications use them temporarily (ephemeral ports) or pick them arbitrarily. Port 1560 happens to have a registration, which means well-behaved software shouldn't use it for something else.
But registration is a weak claim. If RemoteSHADOW isn't running on your network, port 1560 is just another number. Some other application might use it. Malware might use it. Nothing enforces the reservation except convention.
That's the quiet truth about registered ports: they're polite suggestions in a system where nobody's actually checking.
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