Port 2969: ESSP — The Registered Port Nobody Knows

What This Port Is

Port 2969 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These are ports that vendors and developers have formally claimed with IANA, the organization responsible for maintaining the global port registry. A registration means someone filed a form, provided a contact, and reserved the number. It does not mean the protocol is widely used, well-documented, or even still active.

Port 2969 is officially registered as ESSP, with the assignee listed as Hitoshi Ishida of Epson (ishida.hitoshi&exc.epson.co.jp). That is the entirety of publicly available information from IANA.¹

What ESSP Is

Honestly: unclear. There is no RFC, no Epson technical documentation, and no community discussion that meaningfully explains what ESSP does. Based on the contact's affiliation with Epson, it is almost certainly related to Epson's scanner or printer communication stack — Epson uses the neighboring port 2968 for scanner discovery on devices like the WorkForce and DS-series.² ESSP may be a companion service, but this is inference, not documentation.

In practice, port 2969 behaves like an unassigned port: you will not encounter it under normal conditions.

Unofficial Uses

Security databases and port scanners have flagged port 2969 in connection with Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM), which has reportedly used this port for web-based remote administration in some configurations.³ This appears to be an unofficial use layered on top of the registered name.

If you see port 2969 open on a machine that runs Symantec endpoint software, that is the most likely explanation. If you see it open on anything else, investigate.

What's Listening on This Port

To check whether something is using port 2969 on your system:

macOS / Linux:

sudo lsof -i :2969

or

ss -tlnp | grep 2969

Windows:

netstat -aon | findstr :2969

The process ID in the output can be matched against Task Manager or tasklist to identify what opened the port.

Why Registered-but-Obscure Ports Matter

The registered port range contains thousands of entries like this one: formally claimed, occasionally used, never really explained. They are not dangerous by default, but they are not trustworthy either. An open port on this number deserves the same scrutiny as any other: who opened it, why, and should it be reachable from outside the network?

The honest answer for port 2969: unless you are running Epson scanner software or Symantec endpoint management, it should not be open.