NetBIOS?

[Vidar]

Greetings,
Recently I have discovered many instances of netbios running when I do I Netstat. What little info I have found on the topic says netbios is an auditing tool. My question is should I believe this is the case and I am under attack? I would like to know before I call in the network admins and waste their time (aren’t I a good user). Any info would be helpful. Thanks.

[HIESLanMan]

Netbios is not an auditing tool. It is a network operating system, and is responsible for network communications. If it is running on your machine, chances are that your network admins set it up that way.

[ilovetheusers]

The way I understand it, Netbios runs off of UDP and the network neighborhood uses this when accessing other machines. When you open network neighborhood on a peer to peer network your machine broadcasts a UDP signal to other machines looking for themt to find a "master browser" with the location of the other machines. The signals that you see on your firewall from the other machines on your network are probably just the machines looking for each other on the network. My 2000 machines on my network "talk" to each other with netbios every few minutes. Some machines talk more than others but I have noticed that the "chatty" machines are the ones I use the most and have the most services running.

Now, if you get a netbios signal from outside of your network - you may have a problem.