Shorter answer.
My guess is that hosts
entry is just some shortcut the developer who had the machine previously setup for their convenience and is nothing to worry about. If somehow you are concerned about this specific entry, then just comment out that line in the hosts
file, restart the machine and move on. Perhaps check the hosts
file again on reboot to see if somehow a virus/malware action recreated such an entry again. But I wouldn’t be too worried about it.
FWIW, the NPI
in NPI2A54EB
could simply stand for “Network Printer Interface” and that entry could have been created by a printer driver install or something else connected to that laptop’s need to connect to a printer management system on a local area network.
Longer answer.
Does anybody know why this would be entered there and if this could be
a virus or would that be related to the developer's work (I can only
check with him next week again)? (Am a little bit worried that it
might be a virus, but I have checked with multiple antivirus programs
and it looks clean.)
If you borrowed the system from a developer and you are concerned about this, my gut tells me not to be worried. Not too sure what kind of “development” this developer you mentioned is actually doing, but in the world of web development it’s fairly common to see hosts
files edited to allow local web development while using a hostname to make things easier and make sites/applications behave more like real world sites.
For example, if I were working on developing the website for example.com
on my local desktop I might create an entry like this in my hosts
file to allow for what I just described:
127.0.0.1 example_dev
Or maybe something like example.local
:
127.0.0.1 example.local
That said, NPI2A54EB
seems like an odd hostname that wouldn’t make many people’s lives easier. To me it parses like an assigned machine name an I.T. department would assign to hardware. Or perhaps direct traffic to some internal network server or device?
If this all makes you nervous, this is what you can do. Just edit the hosts
file like this. Change that line to this:
#192.168.3.2 NPI2A54EB
Then reboot your machine and check the hosts
file again. That #
will comment out that odd hosts
entry and effectively neutralize. The logic being that if the machine is infected with something like a virus or malware, that line will be uncommented fairly quickly on reboot.
And if something breaks because of this change, well you now know there was something the system needed that was to that entry and you should uncomment it.
But honestly, I doubt commenting out that entry will break anything. Like I said if this is a virus/malware and that’s a key factor to it, you will find out quite quickly on reboot… But I doubt that is what that entry is about. It’s most likely some internal server DNS shortcut the developer who originally was using the machine setup for their convenience and is of no concern to you.
3It isn't a virus.
NPI2A54EB
is a hostname to a machine that only exists on the local network. – Ramhound – 2015-10-07T16:56:41.237@Ramhound Ok, that's good to hear. Do you know this because MPI2A54EB isn't a "normal" adress (with e.g. a .com at the end) or/and also because of the IP address 192.168.3.2? – ManOnAMission – 2015-10-07T17:00:52.227
2well, the IP address is in a private range, and the name is not a FQDN and more than anything else, you don't generally use the host file for any other purpose. its resolution is localized to the host that possesses the file. – Frank Thomas – 2015-10-07T17:09:04.390
4@ManOnAMission - "192.168.3.2" cannot exist outside of your local network. So
NPI2A54EB
must belong to a machine on said network. From a technical stand point there is absolutely no difference betweenNPI2A54EB
andlocalhost
which exist in every single Windows machine's host file with a network connection. There is zero chance it is a virus, how can I be so sure you ask?, one simple reason the ip address does not exist outside of the network so the "virus" wouldn't be able to talk to anything except what is on the network. – Ramhound – 2015-10-07T17:21:35.3371@Ramhound I would just like to state, that if
192.168.3.2
were an infected machine, a virus could use that as some kind of relay. I have seen—and cleaned up—some crazy things so you never know. – JakeGould – 2015-10-07T18:14:28.3673@JakeGould, true, but a malware could also empty the recycle bin. that does not imply that when a recycle bin is emptied, that it is reasonable to assume that malware is a likely, probable, or even only remotely probable vector. Since the Op is specifically asking about a virus, we should point out that that is not in the top 10 most reasonable causes. – Frank Thomas – 2015-10-07T18:32:57.297
Ok; so it's a relay but how does the malware author make money off that? Authors of this type of thing do it to make money. – Ramhound – 2015-10-07T19:28:02.010
1@Ramhound It could be a disgruntled employee who's gathering information to sell/use later, malware that relays everything to a machine internally to securely transmit it outside the local network, or a machine that just dumps everything it receives as a joke. The point is that it's wrong to state there's "zero chance" this is malicious, even if it is very unlikely. Someone in a similar situation could read that and think "oh, this is okay" when they're actually in a bad place. – Chris Hayes – 2015-10-07T22:25:50.613