Port 2262: Registered, Unassigned — The Quiet Middle

Port 2262 has no official service assigned by IANA. It lives in the registered port range (1024–49151) — the vast middle ground between the well-known ports that power the Internet's core infrastructure and the ephemeral ports that clients grab temporarily for outgoing connections.

The Registered Range

The 48,000 ports from 1024 to 49151 are called registered ports. The idea was sound: software vendors could register their application's port with IANA, giving it a stable, documented home. In practice, registration has always been inconsistent. Some major services registered properly. Many never bothered. Others registered and then disappeared, leaving their port number as a historical footnote.

Port 2262 falls into that last category.

The CoMotion Footnote

Some port databases list port 2262 as associated with "CoMotion Backup" — a proprietary distributed backup application. CoMotion appears in no active documentation, no maintained codebase, and no current vendor presence. It was real enough to get cited, but not substantial enough to leave a meaningful trace. The IANA registry does not show an official assignment for this port.¹

This is common in the registered range. Applications come, use a port, and vanish. The port number remains in secondary databases long after the software is gone.

What Might Actually Be on Port 2262

If you see traffic on port 2262 on your network, it's almost certainly one of three things:

1. Custom internal software — Many organizations assign ports to internal tools without registering them. Port 2262 is as good as any other unoccupied number.
2. Development services — Developers frequently pick ports in the 2000s range for local servers and test services.
3. Something worth investigating — Unrecognized traffic on any port warrants a look.

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux or macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 2262
ss -tlnp | grep 2262

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :2262

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2262

Then match the process ID (PID) to a running process:

tasklist | findstr <PID>

For network-wide scanning:

nmap -sV -p 2262 <target-ip>

The -sV flag asks Nmap to probe the service and try to identify what's running, rather than just checking if the port is open.²

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The port system only works when applications agree on where to find each other. A web server on port 80 is findable because everyone knows to look there. An unassigned port is a door with no sign — you can still use it, but you have to tell people where it is through other means (configuration files, service discovery, documentation).

Unassigned ports also matter for security. Unexpected traffic on an unassigned port is a signal worth investigating — it may be legitimate internal software, but it could also be a service that shouldn't be there.