WHATPORT(5985) whatport.net WHATPORT(5985)
5985

WinRM / WS-Management over HTTP

Windows Remote Management — the transport behind PowerShell Remoting and winrs.

TCP IANA registry

Description

IANA registers 5985 as wsman, WBEM WS-Management over HTTP, and Microsoft adopted it as WinRM's default HTTP listener from WinRM 2.0 onward (Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2), replacing the older port 80 listener. This is what Enter-PSSession, Invoke-Command, winrs, and most configuration-management tooling for Windows actually talk to. No listener exists until someone runs winrm quickconfig or enables PowerShell Remoting, so seeing it open means the host is deliberately set up for remote administration — often a domain member, a CI build agent, or an Ansible/Puppet target.

Exposed to the internet?

Do not expose

This is a remote-code-execution plane. Even though WinRM applies message-level encryption when Negotiate/Kerberos is used, AllowUnencrypted and Basic auth can be switched on, and the service should be reachable only from a management network.

Check it yourself

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' -m 5 http://TARGET:5985/wsman

See also

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