I appreciate you may not be aware of the Independent but it’s a general audience publication. That author isn’t even a tech journalist so I doubt they are even

I appreciate you may not be aware of the Independent but it’s a general audience publication. That author isn’t even a tech journalist so I doubt they are even aware of what a TCP/IP port is let alone that it’s related to the subject matter in any way. They’d probably have more familiarity with “port” used in other contexts like: - the opposite of starboard - USB port - the alcoholic beverage (like Wine) …amongst any array of other usages. And out of all of them, the one that makes the most grammatical sense to your average person is maritime ports. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable the way it was written.