260

Port 260/tcp is registered with IANA under the service name openport, with description "Openport," assignee and contact both listed as John Marland, and no reference (RFC) field populated. The registration is dual — 260/udp carries an identical entry (same assignee, same blank Reference/date columns) — and both the Registration Date and Modification Date columns are blank in the source registry, so no assignment date can be reported without fabrication. Beyond the bare IANA listing, there is no verifiable protocol specification, RFC, or mainstream software confirmed to default to this port; it does not appear in Wikipedia's "List of TCP and UDP port numbers" table, which jumps directly from the 249-255 reserved block to 259/ESRO then 262/Arcisdms, suggesting the community-maintained reference does not treat it as a notable well-known port. A single low-authority port-lookup aggregator, auditmypc.com (undated), repeats the IANA "openport" label and flags the port under its generic virus/trojan color-coding scheme, but explicitly disclaims that the flag does not mean malware is currently using the port — only that some unnamed trojan or virus reportedly used it historically, with no CVE, named malware family, or corroborating source located. A separate, secondhand claim tying UDP 260 to a legacy Check Point FireWall-1 SNMP daemon could not be verified in this pass; its source URL now redirects to an apparently unrelated parked domain and is therefore not cited as fact. Net assessment: port 260 is an obscure, essentially undocumented registered service with no reliable security signal beyond its bare IANA registration — unsolicited traffic to it is more plausibly generic port-sweep reconnaissance than legitimate service traffic or confirmed malware activity.

IANA assignment

openport — "Openport"; reference (blank — no RFC cited in IANA registry); assignee/contact [John_Marland]; dual-registered 260/tcp + 260/udp, identical fields on both [Confirmed] — https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.csv

Range class

well-known (0–1023)

Prevalence

nmap-services observed open-frequency 260/tcp ≈ 0.000025 (very low — roughly 2 to 3 in 100,000 scanned hosts in the nmap-services sample); the dual-registered 260/udp side is higher at ≈ 0.000362 [Confirmed] — nmap-services dataset. The figure records scan-observed openness on the port number, not confirmed openport use, and at that magnitude it is consistent with the port-sweep-noise reading rather than a deployed service [Confirmed]

Related ports

none specifically documented as related; sits near the 249-262 sparsely-assigned block [Unknown]

Primary use

Unknown — no protocol specification or documented application is confirmed beyond the bare IANA "Openport" registration

Other/unofficial uses

Unknown/undocumented; a low-authority port-lookup site repeats the IANA label without elaborating on any specific product; an unrelated secondhand claim (UDP 260 = Check Point FireWall-1 SNMP) could not be verified and its source now redirects to a parked domain, so it is not reported as fact

Security implications

one low-authority site (auditmypc.com) flags the port with a generic, undated virus/trojan disclaimer template ("does not mean that a virus is using port 260 ... has used this port in the past"), with no named malware family, CVE, or vendor advisory found; treat as unconfirmed

Typically seen on

Unknown; port 260 is absent from Wikipedia's well-known-ports table (jumps from the 249-255 reserved block to 259/ESRO then 262/Arcisdms)

Analyst note

an obscure, thinly-documented registered port with no confirmed live security signal; unsolicited traffic is more plausibly attributable to generic port-sweep scanning than to a legitimate service or confirmed malware.

Port 260/udp is registered with IANA under the service name "openport," with the description simply "Openport" and assignee/contact listed as John Marland. The registry provides no RFC or document reference, and both the registration date and modification date fields are blank in the source data — rather than invent values, those are recorded as null. This is a dual registration: port 260 is registered under the identical service name "openport" for TCP as well, with the same assignee, contact, and blank date/reference fields, immediately preceding the UDP row in the registry (line 583 tcp / line 584 udp of the cached IANA CSV, confirmed against the live IANA registry page). Beyond the bare name-to-number binding, no independent protocol specification, vendor documentation, or software project was found describing what "openport" actually does or which application defaults to this port — third-party port-lookup aggregator sites (SpeedGuide, tcp-udp-ports.com) mirror the same bare IANA label without adding verifiable detail, and SpeedGuide could not even be fetched directly (HTTP 403) to confirm that much independently. No documented history of malware, botnet activity, or attack tooling targeting 260/udp was found, and it does not surface in general UDP-scanning literature, which tends to focus on well-known services such as DNS or SNMP. Given how sparse the documentation is, the more defensible read is that this is a genuinely low-visibility, rarely-if-ever deployed registered port rather than one with a confirmed real-world use — its practical relevance to an analyst is chiefly as an assigned-but-essentially-unused entry, worth flagging as an anomaly rather than treating as a known-benign service if it ever appears active in traffic.

IANA assignment

openport — "Openport"; reference blank (no RFC cited); assignee/contact John Marland; dual-registered 260/tcp + 260/udp, identical service name [Confirmed] — IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry (cached CSV lines 583–584; corroborated by live IANA registry page)

Range class

well-known (0–1023) [Confirmed]

Registration/modification date

null — both date fields blank in the registry; not fabricated [Confirmed] — IANA registry

Prevalence

nmap-services observed open-frequency 260/udp ≈ 0.000362 — very low (roughly 4 in 10,000 scanned hosts in the nmap-services sample); the paired 260/tcp row is rarer still at ≈ 0.000025 [Confirmed] — nmap-services dataset

Related ports

260/tcp — dual IANA registration, identical service name, same assignee/contact, same blank date/reference fields [Confirmed] — IANA registry

Primary use

Unknown — the IANA entry is a bare name-to-number binding with no linked RFC or documentation describing protocol behavior

Other/unofficial uses

Unknown — no independent software or vendor documentation was found associating any specific application with this port [Unknown]

Security implications

no documented malware, botnet, or attack-tool association found; absence of scanning chatter reflects lack of documentation rather than a confirmed-safe assessment [Unknown]

Typically seen on

Unknown — no confirmed deployments found [Unknown]