Port 10246 — Unassigned — A Door With No Tenant

What This Port Is

Port 10246 is a registered port in the Internet's numbered system—it falls in the range 1024 to 49151. This range is reserved for services that can register with IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), but 10246 itself has no official assignment. It's a blank number on the port registry. No RFC defines it. No standard service claims it. It exists in an undefined state.

What Range It Belongs To

The port numbers are divided into three regions:

• Well-Known Ports (0-1023): Reserved for system services. SSH at 22, HTTP at 80, HTTPS at 443. These are the famous doors.
• Registered Ports (1024-49151): Available to applications and services that request IANA registration. A application developer can claim a port here. 10246 sits in this range, unclaimed.
• Dynamic/Ephemeral (49152-65535): For temporary connections that don't need permanent assignment.

Port 10246 is in the middle territory—official enough to have a number, unimportant enough that no one has bothered to register for it.

Known Uses

There are no documented, official uses for port 10246. Security scanners and port databases list it. Some security monitoring systems (like SANS ISC) track probe activity across all ports, including this one, because attackers sometimes scan unassigned ports hoping to find something listening there. But there is no standard protocol, no well-known application, no reason it should be open.

This is the honest answer: Nothing significant uses this port. If you find something listening on 10246, it's either:

• An internal application someone wrote
• A service running on a non-standard port for obscurity or custom setup
• Somebody testing something
• A mistake

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux/macOS:

# Modern way (faster, more reliable)
ss -tlnp | grep 10246

# Classic way (deprecated but still works)
netstat -tlnp | grep 10246

# Using lsof (verbose, shows file descriptors)
lsof -i :10246

On Windows:

# Show all listening ports with process IDs
netstat -ano | findstr :10246

# Using PowerShell (modern)
Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 10246

If the port is open, you'll see the process name or ID. Then you can investigate what's actually running on it.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

Unassigned ports are the breathing room of the Internet. They represent freedom—the ability to build something custom without waiting for IANA approval. They're also revealing: if you find an unassigned port with traffic, you've found something someone built in secret, or something someone misconfigured, or something worth investigating.

Port 10246 is one of thousands of unassigned numbers. Most will never be touched. Some will be claimed by services that need custom ports. This port is a door that currently stands open, with no one home.

• IANA Service Names and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry
• SANS Internet Storm Center - Port 10246 Attack Activity
• SpeedGuide Port Information - Port 10246
• Linuxize - Check for Listening Ports in Linux
• IBM - Check if an Application is Listening on a Port
• MITRE ATT&CK - Non-Standard Port (T1571)