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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