GRC | Port Authority, for Internet Port 119

Port Authority Edition – Internet Vulnerability Profiling
by Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corporation.

Goto Port 118

Probe Port 119


Enter Port: 0-65535

Goto Port 120

Port Authority Database

Port 119

Name:	nntp
Purpose:	Network News Transfer Protocol
Description:	Port 119 hosts the servers of the famous and infamous Internet USENET newsgroup world. NNTP servers push and pull news articles to and from other NNTP servers over port 119, and news reading (and writing) clients talking to news servers over the same port.
Related Ports:	-

Background and Additional Information:

"USENET News" has been around since the beginning of the Internet and the protocol, while being tweaked just a bit here and there, has remained largely unchanged. USENET has a somewhat spotty past, having been the first target of pervasive, and often extremely tasteless, unsolicited commercial junk postings (SPAM) long before SPAM hit the eMail world.

Many long-standing problems surrounding abuses of news servers and content have caused many ISPs to preemptively block incoming traffic to end-users' port 119, thus prohibiting the operation of NNTP news servers by ISP customers.

If you find that your port 119 shows "stealth" (green/blocked) when you have deliberately lowered your security in order to detect ports being preemptively blocked by ISPs, it's almost certain that your provider is blocking port 119 to keep their customers from operating NNTP news servers.

The final IDENT RFC 1413:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc977.txt

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc977.html

Trojan Sightings: Happy99

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