Port 967 — The empty seat in the well-known ports

Port 967 is unassigned. It has no official service registered with IANA, no protocol that calls it home, no packets that arrive here by design.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 967 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), also called System Ports. These are the ports assigned by IANA—the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority—to services that need universal recognition. Port 22 for SSH. Port 80 for HTTP. Port 443 for HTTPS.

But port 967 never got that assignment. It's part of an unassigned block spanning ports 914 through 988.¹ Seventy-five port numbers in the most valuable real estate of the port system, sitting empty.

Why This Matters

The well-known ports were assigned in the early days of the Internet, when people imagined we'd need thousands of globally recognized services. We didn't. Most of the crucial protocols claimed their ports by the mid-1990s. The rest—like port 967—never found a purpose.

Today, unassigned well-known ports are rarely granted. The bar is high. The service needs to be genuinely universal, something the entire Internet might use. Port 967 has been waiting since the port system was created, and it's still waiting.

What If You Find Port 967 Open?

If you run netstat or lsof and see port 967 listening on your machine, something is using it—but not something official. It could be:

• Custom software that picked an arbitrary port number
• Malware that chose an obscure port to hide in
• A misconfigured service that should be on a different port

Check what's listening:

# On Linux/Mac
sudo lsof -i :967
sudo netstat -tulpn | grep 967

# On Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :967

The output will show you the process ID and program name. If you don't recognize it, investigate.

The Unassigned Ports in the Port System

Unassigned ports aren't broken or forgotten. They're reserved for future use—held in case someone builds something genuinely new that needs universal recognition.

But realistically? Most new protocols use registered ports (1024-49151) or dynamic ports (49152-65535) instead. The well-known ports are historical artifacts. The important ones were claimed decades ago.

Port 967 is a number without a story. An empty seat at a table that was set for thousands but only needed dozens.

How to Check What's Using a Port

If you need to identify what service is using port 967 (or any port) on your system:

Linux/Mac:

sudo lsof -i :967
sudo ss -tulpn | grep 967
sudo netstat -tulpn | grep 967

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :967

Then use the Process ID (PID) to identify the application:

# Windows
tasklist | findstr <PID>

# Linux/Mac
ps aux | grep <PID>