Port 762: Quotad — A ghost in the registry

Port 762 sits in the well-known ports range with an official assignment, but almost no history. It's registered to a service called "quotad," and that's where the trail goes cold.

What Lives Here (Officially)

According to IANA's Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, port 762 is assigned to quotad for both TCP and UDP.¹

The name suggests "quote daemon"—possibly related to serving quotes or quotations over a network. But there's no RFC defining it, no documentation describing it, and no evidence of widespread implementation.

The Ghost Assignment Problem

Port 762 represents a common pattern in the well-known ports range (0-1023): official assignments to services that either:

• Never launched publicly
• Died quietly in the early Internet era
• Were superseded before gaining adoption
• Existed only in specific institutional environments

These ghost assignments occupy valuable real estate in the most restricted port range, reserved decades ago for software that may never have shipped.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 762 falls in the well-known ports range (0-1023), also called system ports. This range is managed by IANA and requires "IETF Review" or "IESG Approval" for assignments according to RFC 6335.²

Well-known ports are meant for standard, widely-deployed services. They're privileged—on Unix-like systems, only root can bind to these ports. The idea was to reserve them for protocols everyone would use.

But not every assignment lived up to that promise. Port 762 is one of the quiet ones.

Checking What's Actually Listening

Even though quotad appears to be a ghost service, you might find something listening on port 762 if:

• An application chose it arbitrarily
• A custom or internal service uses it
• Malware selected it (unlikely, but possible)

On Linux or macOS:

# See what's listening on port 762
sudo lsof -i :762

# Or use netstat
sudo netstat -tuln | grep 762

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :762

If nothing appears, the port is unused—which is the most likely scenario for port 762.

Why Unassigned or Ghost Ports Matter

The well-known ports range was designed when the Internet was smaller and coordination was simpler. Every service that might become standard got a reservation. Some of those reservations became DNS (port 53), HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)—ports that carry the entire modern Internet.

Others became port 762.

Ghost assignments like this one remind us that the port system isn't perfectly efficient. Hundreds of well-known ports sit reserved for services that never materialized, while modern applications crowd into the registered ports range (1024-49151) or use dynamic ports (49152-65535).

There have been discussions about reclaiming unused well-known ports, but changing IANA assignments is difficult. Once a port is officially registered, removing that assignment risks breaking something, somewhere, that might still depend on it—even if that something is vanishingly rare.

So port 762 remains. Officially assigned. Quietly unused. A ghost in the registry.