An MS Windows NT4/200x/XP Professional workstation in the domain MIDEARTH that wants a local user to be authenticated has to find the domain controller for MIDEARTH. It does this by doing a NetBIOS name query for the group name MIDEARTH<1C>. It assumes that each of the machines it gets back from the queries is a domain controller and can answer logon requests. To not open security holes, both the workstation and the selected domain controller authenticate each other. After that the workstation sends the user's credentials (name and password) to the local domain controller for validation.