What Range Is This?
Port 1037 belongs to the Registered Ports range: 1024-49151. These ports are assigned by IANA to services that request them through official channels. Unlike the Well-Known Ports (0-1023), which are reserved for standard protocols and require IANA approval, the Registered Ports are "first come, first served" — any organization can request assignment for their service1.
The difference matters: a Well-Known Port is a promise. Port 80 is HTTP. Full stop. A Registered Port is a reservation. If nobody reserved it, it just sits there, unassigned but available.
Port 1037 is unassigned2. It has never been officially claimed.
Known Unofficial Uses
What does happen with unassigned ports? Manufacturers use them anyway.
Windows Systems: Port 1037 sometimes appears in Windows process monitoring, mapped to svchost.exe, the system process that hosts Windows services. The actual service is unclear—various sources mention Windows Messenger or COM+ Event System, but there's no official Windows service with a standardized claim to port 10373.
VxWorks Embedded Controllers: On National Instruments CompactRIO devices and other embedded systems running VxWorks, port 1037 is sometimes used for hardware enumeration services related to LabVIEW applications4. This is vendor-specific and undocumented outside NI's ecosystem.
Security History: Port 1037 has been associated with the MoSucker trojan, an older piece of malware that functioned as a keylogger and remote access tool5. Like most ports, it has no inherent security properties—it's just another number. Bad actors used it; that tells you nothing about port 1037 itself.
How to Check What's Listening
If port 1037 is open on your machine, you can see what's behind it:
macOS/Linux:
Windows:
These commands will show the process ID (PID) and process name using the port. From there, you can look up the process and decide if it should be there.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
Here's the honest truth: the port system works because most people follow the rules, but the system doesn't break if they don't.
Port 1037 is unassigned, which means IANA says it doesn't belong to anything. That makes it available for anyone to use. The Internet doesn't have a traffic cop enforcing port assignments. When you connect to a machine on port 1037, you're relying on convention and trust. The machine at the other end decided to use that port. Maybe it registered it. Maybe it didn't.
There are roughly 48,000 Registered Ports. Thousands of them are unassigned. For every port with an RFC and a well-documented protocol, there are dozens of dark ports with no name, used by embedded systems and internal tools that nobody outside a particular organization knows about. They work fine. They're just invisible.
Port 1037 is one of those invisible ports. It doesn't do anything in particular. It might be doing something on your machine right now, or it might never wake up. Either way, IANA has no official record of what it's for.
That's the system working as intended.
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