What This Port Is
Port 2402 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that vendors and developers have formally claimed through IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — to identify their software on a network. Think of it as the port equivalent of a business address: you register it so other software knows where to find you.
IANA's registry lists port 2402 under the service name taskmaster2000, assigned to IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture on both TCP and UDP.1
What TaskMaster 2000 Actually Was
IBM Datacap Taskmaster Capture is an enterprise platform for turning paper into data. Hospitals, banks, and government agencies use it to feed stacks of documents through scanners, then automatically extract the useful information using OCR (optical character recognition), barcode scanning, and handwriting recognition.2
Think: a hospital scanning thousands of patient intake forms so the data lands in the right database without a human typing every field. Or a bank processing mortgage applications at scale. Taskmaster handles the unglamorous infrastructure that makes paper-heavy industries function.
The "2000" in the IANA registration name is a timestamp from when this port was claimed — around the turn of the millennium, when that suffix felt like a promise of the future.
What You'll Actually Find Here
Probably nothing. Unless IBM Datacap Taskmaster is deployed in your environment, port 2402 will be closed. This is a narrow enterprise product. You won't find it on home networks, small offices, or general-purpose servers.
If port 2402 is open on a machine that isn't explicitly running Datacap, that's worth investigating.
How to Check What's Listening
Linux/macOS:
Windows (Command Prompt as Administrator):
The last column in the Windows output is the Process ID (PID). Cross-reference it with Task Manager to find the owning process.
Why Unassigned-in-Practice Ports Matter
The registered ports range contains thousands of entries like this one: formally claimed, legitimately purposed, but rarely encountered outside their specific niche. They matter for two reasons.
First, they establish namespace. If TaskMaster Capture registers port 2402, no other well-behaved software should claim the same port. The registry prevents collisions.
Second, unexpected activity on these ports is a signal. SANS Internet Storm Center tracks daily scanning activity on port 2402 — probes from across the Internet, testing for open doors in enterprise software that most organizations have forgotten to patch or close.3 A port that's quiet by default becomes interesting precisely because legitimate traffic on it is rare.
If something is listening on port 2402 and you didn't put it there, ask why.
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