Port 2913: Boosterware — A Registered Port Nobody Remembers

Port 2913 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151), the middle tier of the port number space. These ports are assigned by IANA upon request and are intended for specific applications and services — not system processes (that's the well-known ports below 1024), and not the ephemeral ports your operating system grabs temporarily for outgoing connections (49152–65535).

What's Actually Registered Here

IANA's registry lists port 2913 as assigned to "boosterware" (Booster Ware), on both TCP and UDP, with a contact listed as Ido Ben-David.¹

That's about all there is to find. There's no RFC, no documentation, no open source project, no product page. Search for "Booster Ware" and you surface only port database mirror sites echoing the IANA entry back at itself. Whatever Booster Ware was, it left no footprint.

This is not unusual. The registered port namespace contains thousands of entries like this: a name, a contact, a timestamp from years ago, and silence. A developer registered the port at some point — perhaps for a product that never shipped, or shipped and never mattered, or was discontinued without ceremony. The registration persists. The software does not.

The Port You're Actually Seeing

If you see traffic on port 2913 on a real system today, it almost certainly has nothing to do with Booster Ware. Unassigned and dormant registered ports get used all the time by:

• Internal enterprise applications picking an available port
• Games and peer-to-peer software using non-standard ports to avoid filters
• Malware avoiding well-known port ranges

None of that is specific to 2913. It's just the nature of ports in this range when the official registration is effectively dead.

How to Check What's Listening

If port 2913 shows up in your firewall logs or a port scan, find the actual process before drawing conclusions:

macOS / Linux:

sudo lsof -i :2913
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 2913

Windows:

netstat -aon | findstr :2913

Then take the process ID from the output and look it up. The process name will tell you more than the port number ever could.

Why Ghost Registrations Exist

The IANA registration process is intentionally low-friction. A developer submits a request, provides a contact, and the port gets listed. There's no requirement that the software actually ship, gain users, or continue to exist. The registry is a reservation system, not a census of living services.

The result is a namespace with genuine gaps between the records — ports that are "taken" on paper but available in practice. Port 2913 is one of them.