Status: Assigned (Well-Known Port)
Service: skronk
Protocols: TCP and UDP
Official: Yes (IANA registered)
What Skronk Is
Port 460 is officially assigned to skronk, a networked implementation of FizzBin—the fictional card game from Star Trek.12
In the 1968 episode "A Piece of the Action," Captain Kirk invents FizzBin on the spot to distract gangsters while McCoy and Spock work behind him. The rules are deliberately nonsensical: "Two jacks are a half-fizzbin. If you have a half-fizzbin on a Tuesday, that's good unless there's a king, in which case you'd need another jack or a card with a number on it." The worst possible hand in FizzBin is called a "kronk."3
Someone took this joke seriously enough to build a networked version of the game, name it after the worst hand, and register an official IANA port number for it.1
The Well-Known Range
Port 460 sits in the well-known port range (0-1023), which IANA reserves for system services and widely-used protocols. Getting a port in this range requires formal registration. Skronk secured this allocation sometime before 2005, when it was already documented in port databases.2
This matters because well-known ports are supposed to be for infrastructure. HTTP gets 80. SMTP gets 25. DNS gets 53. And skronk—a networked Star Trek card game—gets 460.
That's genuinely delightful.
What Actually Runs Here
Almost nothing. Skronk appears to have been a real implementation at some point, but there's virtually no documentation of it being actively used today. Network scans occasionally flag port 460 for historical malware associations, but that's generic suspicion of any unused well-known port, not evidence that skronk itself was malicious.4
If you find port 460 open on a system, it's more likely to be:
- Leftover configuration from decades ago
- A custom service repurposing the port
- Someone who really, really likes Star Trek
Why This Port Matters
Skronk is a time capsule. The Internet in the early days was small enough that someone could build a networked card game based on a TV show joke and claim a well-known port for it. Today, getting a new well-known port assignment is nearly impossible—they're reserved for protocols that serve millions of users.
Port 460 proves that the Internet was once playful enough to preserve space for things that didn't need to exist but deserved to anyway.
How to Check What's Using Port 460
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something is listening, the output will show the process ID and program name. If nothing appears, the port is closed.
Related Ports
- Port 79 (Finger): Another early protocol that felt whimsical by modern standards, used to get information about users
- Port 43 (WHOIS): Information lookup protocol from the same era when the Internet was small and trusting
Frequently Asked Questions
The Genuine Strangeness
Kirk made up FizzBin to buy time. The rules were nonsense. The game doesn't exist.
And yet port 460 is real, officially registered, sitting in the same range as SSH and HTTPS, waiting for someone to play a card game that was always a distraction technique.
That's the Internet at its best—serious infrastructure with room for joy.
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