Port 2622: MetricaDBC — Registered, Forgotten

What Port 2622 Is

Port 2622 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that individuals, organizations, and companies can formally register with IANA to claim for their software. The intent is to prevent collisions — if your database server uses 2622, you don't want to discover that someone else's VoIP client also decided to use 2622.

Port 2622 is registered. It belongs to something called MetricaDBC.

MetricaDBC

The IANA registry lists port 2622 (TCP and UDP) as "MetricaDBC," registered by Russ Olivant at metrica.co.uk.¹ That's the full extent of the public record.

Metrica appears to have been a UK-based company. MetricaDBC was presumably a database connectivity protocol. Whether the software shipped, found users, or simply evaporated — there's no trace of it in any documentation, forum, or release announcement that has survived the web's memory.

This happens more than you'd expect. The IANA registered ports list contains hundreds of entries like this: a name, a contact, a port number, and nothing else. Someone had a plan. They filed the paperwork. Then the software never shipped, the company folded, or the project quietly died. The registration outlived the product.

What You'll Actually Find on Port 2622

Almost nothing legitimate. If you scan the Internet and find something listening on port 2622, it's almost certainly:

• Custom internal software that chose the port arbitrarily
• Misconfigured services that wandered onto an unused port
• Malware — auditmypc.com notes that a trojan used this port at some point in the past, though no specific malware family is widely documented²

The fact that 2622 has no well-known legitimate use makes it a reasonable choice for something that wants to hide in plain sight.

How to Check What's Listening on This Port

On any Unix-like system:

# Show what process is listening on port 2622
sudo lsof -i :2622

# Or with ss (faster on modern Linux)
ss -tlnp | grep 2622

# Or with netstat
netstat -tlnp | grep 2622

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2622

If something shows up and you don't recognize it, that's worth investigating.

Why Unassigned (and Forgotten) Ports Matter

The registered ports range was designed to bring order to the chaos of port allocation. Without it, every application would pick numbers arbitrarily and collisions would be constant. The system works reasonably well for heavily-used protocols — nobody accidentally squats on port 443.

But ports like 2622 reveal the limits of the model. Registration is easy, maintenance is nonexistent, and the registry has no mechanism to reclaim ports from defunct software. The IANA registry has thousands of entries pointing at companies and contacts that no longer exist.

The result: a large swath of the registered range is functionally indistinguishable from unassigned. The paperwork says occupied. The network says empty.