Port 137 - Netbios Name Service Traffic going everywhere

GlassWire Help
1

I’m seeing my Windows 10 computer sending Port 137 traffic to all corners of the internet - mostly large or network oriented companies. It appear to be coming from the ‘system’ process in Windows. Does Glasswire have the ability to stop this? I’m trying to figure out why it’s even present at all. I turned off Windows Networking Client from the network interface properties so I’m confused as to why it’s still sending this traffic.

From the Firewall screen on Glasswire I see a the port number associated with a content delivery network of ‘Foreign Affairs’ a trade magazine for foreign services folks. I look at their web site from time to time. The process is the Windows kernel: ntoskrnl or something like that. Why is the Windows kernel sending information to the companies of the web sites I visit? That is alarming.

Here’s just a few of the companies that my computer is sending traffic to.
PubMatic, Inc.
University of Washington
Microsoft Corporation
Oracle Corporation
DigitalOcean, LLC
Rackspace Hosting
Fastly
StackPath, LLC.
ANS Communications, Inc
CDNEXT-SEA
QUANTIL NETWORKS INC
Dropbox, Inc.
Dalius Gikaras
Automattic, Inc
Quantcast Corporation
Turn Inc
Verizon Business
Oracle Public Cloud
Iguana WorldWide
Pulsepoint Inc
SpotX, Inc.
RhythmOne, LLC

Any assistance would be appreciated.
Thanks

2

Interesting! May I ask what web browser you use?

Are you using a VPN, or some kind of network-routing system that’s unusual?

3

I use Proton VPN but this NetBios traffic curcumvents it. I can see that my firewall blocks it all on my local network before it reaches my ISP.

I use Firefox but recall it’s the kernel process not my browser that is doing all the nefarious communication. It’s curious that the kernel knows all about my browsing history presumably via tracking network connections.

4

That sounds odd. On my system GlassWire reports my Netbios Name Service traffic from ntoskrnl only going to local host addresses in the 192.168.x.x range.

Not using a VPN, and running the latest GlassWire version on Windows 10 Pro 21H2.