Port 80 carried the web for two decades—every page, every form, every image. Now it mostly redirects you to the secure entrance at 443.
The Internet was built for trust between researchers. Port 443 is the architectural fix that made it survivable when that assumption shattered.
Before any connection happens, your device asks a question on port 53. DNS carries these questions—and until recently, broadcast them in plain text to anyone watching.
Before SSH, every password crossed the network in plaintext. Port 22 changed that—enabling encrypted remote access that lets you manage machines across the world while making eavesdropping worthless.
Port 25 was email's open door until spammers walked through it. Now ISPs block it for users while servers still rely on it to talk to each other.
Port 465 was killed in 1998 and resurrected in 2018. Port 587 was the official replacement nobody fully adopted. Here's what actually happened—and which port to use now.
POP3 was designed for a world where your computer didn't view your email—it became your email. Messages transfer from server to machine, then vanish from the server. Here's why that model still makes sense sometimes, and why port 110's unencrypted simplicity is both its appeal and its danger.
IMAP turned your inbox from a place into an idea—mail that lives on a server and follows you everywhere. Port 143 is where that happens, but it has a fatal flaw: everything travels in plaintext.
Port 993 encrypts your email before a single byte is exchanged. Port 143 with STARTTLS hopes to upgrade after the conversation starts. That hope is the vulnerability.
Port 995 wraps POP3 in TLS encryption from the first byte. Your credentials never travel in the clear, and your emails download to your machine rather than living on someone else's server.
FTP assumes servers can call clients back—a design that worked when the Internet trusted incoming connections. Then firewalls arrived, and a forty-year-old protocol collided with modern security.
Telnet sent every keystroke—including passwords—as readable text across the network. In 1969's trusted research community, that was practical. On today's Internet, it's an open invitation to attackers.
Your computer doesn't actually know what time it is. Port 123 and NTP are how billions of devices maintain consensus about when "now" is—and why everything breaks when they disagree.
Port 3306 is the default gateway to MySQL—and to everything your application knows. Every query, credential, and piece of user data flows through it, which is exactly why attackers scan for it constantly.
Port 5432 is the single door through which all PostgreSQL traffic flows. The port is just a number—what matters is pg_hba.conf rule order, SSL with verify-full, and the layers you put in front of it.
Redis was built for trusted networks that assumed firewalls meant safety. That assumption broke, and port 6379 became one of the most exploited doors on the Internet.
MongoDB's default port became a brutal lesson in database security when attackers wiped tens of thousands of unprotected databases and left ransom notes behind—often without bothering to save the data first.
RDP on port 3389 gives attackers full control of Windows systems. Millions of organizations expose it directly to the Internet. Here's why that's catastrophic and what to do instead.
Port 8080 exists because early Unix reserved low ports for root. That constraint—now dissolved on macOS and questioned elsewhere—shaped how we build development servers and reverse proxies. The convention outlived the requirement.
To speak on a network, you need an address. To get an address, you need to speak. DHCP solves this impossible problem with two ports and a four-step dance that bootstraps billions of devices into existence every day.
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