The Internet was largely born on UNIX-based systems and servers. UNIX enforces the notion of the first 1023 "privileged ports" which can only be opened by services running with so-called "root", or administrative, privileges. Historically, this meant that only authorized system administrators were able to establish and operate a web server on port 80 since this was within the first 1023-port privileged region. Therefore, when non-administrators wished to run their own web servers on machines which might already have a server running on port 80, or when they were not authorized to run services below port 1024, port 8080 was often chosen as a convenient place to host a secondary or alternate web server.
As you will see in greater detail in the discussion of URL defaults and port overrides on the port 81 page, a specially formed URL of the form http://www.domain.com:8080/ is used to specify a port other than the protocol's default.
See Also
Port 8080, Why do I see this a lot? What does it mean? What is the History behind it?Port 8080 – ItexusWhat is Port 80? - GeeksforGeeksPort 8080 (tcp/udp)For further information regarding accessing port 8080, see the discussion on the port 81 page regarding URL defaults and overriding the default ports used by Internet protocols.
Trojan Sightings: Brown Orifice, Generic backdoor, RemoConChubo, Reverse WWW Tunnel Backdoor, RingZero
