Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation, 2nd Edition

Understanding Windows Services

Although many processes are capable of opening a port, the regular practice in the Windows world is to use a service to bind to a port. The reason for this is the reliability of a service. Services are monitored and managed by the operating system itself. Services can automatically be started whenever the system boots, they can be monitored to ensure that they are still running, and they can be restarted automatically in the event of a problem. Since most open ports are used to listen for client requests, these added management and reliability features of services are generally desirable.

Service Control Programs and the Service Control Manager

Management and control of services are a little more involved than ...