Big Brother and Ndisuio.sys

Big Brother and Ndisuio.sys
A new Internet phenomenon?


Ndisuio.sys, a very mysterious system file is present in Windows XP and
is a driver for wireless things such as wi-fi and bluetooth. However,
there have been many issues with this file downloading immense amounts
of data and perhaps causing activity that is "big brother"ish.

The fact that hardly any information on this file downloading data is
available by Microsoft makes things quite suspicious about it. It has
even been noted that it looked as if it was transferring data to major
companies like Comcast, Road Runner, Time Warner, BTC and Verizon.

The good news is, it turns out this file duplicates data that is
sent/received, so wherever you go, it will also transfer the data to
that file but it does not leave the computer/network so it's not
spyware. So it's not as much of a big brother situation then it looks
like. It simply performs internal communication tasks and stands for
NDIS user I/O, hence, NDISUIO. NDISUIO is also used as a driver by many
developers as it makes certain wireless network tasks easier such as
implementing it for 802.11x connections. Some firewalls also use it as
it can get the data in order to filter it.

But duplicating this data can hog resources for no reason, so disabling
it is the best thing to do. The data rate of this file's received data
is huge, so that indicates that the data transfer is not over the
Internet, but locally. So it's just a duplicate of network activity but
because it's local everything transfers faster but uses more resources
then casual internet usage as there's more data involved at a given
time span of 1 second, for example.

To disable this file, go to the control panel, administration tools,
services, Wireless Zero Configuration, double click and disable it.
This file is probably required to run if you use any linksys wireless
devices.