Actually I misunderstood and thought the server was Linux. You could of course use nc as the client too, but it would be an additional install on Windows. [0]

Actually I misunderstood and thought the server was Linux. You could of course use nc as the client too, but it would be an additional install on Windows. [0] And nc wouldn't help if the firewall was stateful and actually expected to see HTTPS traffic on port 443, so I do see their logic of putting an actual webserver there. But without sufficient detail, it does seem at first glance to be overkill ;-) [0] https://joncraton.org/blog/46/netcat-for-windows/ https://joncraton.org/blog/46/netcat-for-windows/