Port 3345: Influence — A Name Without a Story

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 3345 falls in the registered ports range (1024-49151), also called User Ports. This range is managed by IANA and is intended for applications that want a stable, predictable port number — things like databases, game servers, and enterprise software. Unlike the well-known ports below 1024, registered ports don't require special system privileges to bind.

The range is large. With over 48,000 possible registered ports, not every number has a real tenant.

The "Influence" Ghost

Some port databases list port 3345 under a service name: influence. It shows up on SpeedGuide, GRC's Port Authority, and a handful of TCP/UDP lookup tools.

But follow that name anywhere — search for an RFC, a vendor, a protocol specification, a changelog — and you find nothing. There is no documented "Influence" protocol. No company claimed it. No software was built around it. The name appears to be either a historical placeholder that never became anything, or a submission that was never backed by a real implementation.¹

This is not unusual. The registered port range has entries like this scattered throughout it — names without stories, ports that were reserved and then abandoned, or that refer to software that quietly disappeared.

Port 3345 is not known to be used by any current software in any significant deployment.

Security Note

Unassigned ports are sometimes exploited by malware precisely because they're quiet. A process listening on an obscure, undocumented port is less likely to trigger attention than one on a well-known port. If you see unexpected traffic on port 3345, it's worth investigating — not because the port itself is dangerous, but because nothing legitimate should be using it.

How to Check What's Listening on This Port

If you see port 3345 active on a system and want to know what process owns it:

macOS / Linux:

# Show the process listening on port 3345
sudo lsof -i :3345

# Or with ss (Linux):
ss -tlnp sport = :3345

Windows (PowerShell):

# Show process ID and name for port 3345
Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 3345 | Select-Object LocalAddress, LocalPort, State, OwningProcess
Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 3345).OwningProcess

These commands show you what process, if any, has claimed the port. An unknown process listening here without explanation is worth scrutinizing.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The port numbering system only works because most of it is predictable. You know port 443 is HTTPS. You know port 22 is SSH. That predictability lets firewalls, monitoring tools, and administrators reason about traffic at a glance.

Unassigned ports are the gaps in that predictability. They're not inherently bad — every application has to live somewhere, and registered ports give legitimate software a stable address. But gaps in the registry are also the dark corners of the port space, where unusual activity is harder to explain and easier to hide.

The discipline of knowing what's running on your ports — and why — is what separates a managed network from a mystery.