If you’ve ever encountered the following dialog – you know that an application has crashed in Windows. As the dialog indicates, Microsoft is checking for a solution to the problem – which means it’s communicating back to Microsoft servers. While this may not be a problem for your enterprise environment, it’s additional noise that you typically don’t want/need in your malware sandbox. The following screenshot shows example HTTP traffic reporting the error. If you’re running an IDS such as Suricata – Emerging Threats also has a couple of signatures that can help you identify this traffic/behavior. You can disable this…
Read moreMonth: January 2020
Disabling Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI)
According to this article on MSDN, Microsoft introduced the Network Connectivity Status Indicator in Windows Vista. While there may be a number of reasons to investigate this service, my motivation is in eliminating the resulting network traffic from my malware sandbox. This service performs an HTTP GET request for a text document, ncsi.txt, from any number of Microsoft hosts. While it would be easy enough to filter this traffic based off of the user-agent (Microsoft NCSI) or similar, in this scenario I find it even better to simply eliminate the behavior all together. To accomplish this, there is only a…
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