Has anyone else received the following, DoS Alert using Facetime?

JoeC · March 2020

Wi-Fi Security Alert

Wi-Fi station (MAC address) is being attacked

Your network is being attacked by a Denial of Service (DoS) attack of type: De-authentication flood. A device is flooding the Wi-Fi to force disconnection of your access points and devices.The end result is that your network becomes very unstable and slowed down.In some cases, it could happen when the Wi-Fi access point is not working properly so you may want to reboot it.

This started with the last update and happens every time I use Facetime on the network. Tested it by turning off Wi-Fi and Facetime on mobile and no issue.

Any help is appreciated.

kltaylor · March 2020

Hi @JoeC, welcome to our community and thanks for asking us your question.

I would do exactly as it suggests, reboot your network and monitor for that error again. If it happens again, my next suggestion would be to change the passwords on your router and your WiFi access points, don't rely just on the router to configure the wireless connections for you.

Let me know what happens after you've performed those steps so I can help you further.

JoeC · March 2020

I did the reboot and still ran into the same issue. I also tried using a different app zoom and still had the same message.

kltaylor · March 2020

Ironically enough, I just read an article about the Zoom app:

https://threatpost.com/zoom-kills-ios-apps-data-sharing-facebook/154275/

"Zoom has removed a feature in its iOS web conferencing app that was sharing analytics data with Facebook, after a report revealing the practice sparked outrage.

According to the Motherboard report last week that originally disclosed the privacy issue, the transferred information included data on when a user opened the app, a user’s time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores and disk space. Zoom’s privacy policy did not clearly outline that it was transferring the data to Facebook."

May not be directly related, but it could be a consideration, especially since Zoom had removed its pay features for teachers nationwide to use to continue teaching to students while in isolation.

@Robin in on this as well, see if he can help with figuring this out with me.

JoeC · March 2020

Thanks for your reply @kitaylor, if it only happened with zoom I would think that it could be the cause but I use facetime most of the time and it occurs almost every time. At this point I am going to setup a sniffer to capture network packets to see if I can see anything odd in the traffic.

kltaylor · March 2020

Good idea, let me know what Wireshark finds, please.

Robin · April 2020

kltaylor said:

According to the Motherboard report last week that originally disclosed the privacy issue, the transferred information included data on when a user opened the app, a user’s time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores and disk space. Zoom’s privacy policy did not clearly outline that it was transferring the data to Facebook."
May not be directly related, but it could be a consideration, especially since Zoom had removed its pay features for teachers nationwide to use to continue teaching to students while in isolation.
@Robin in on this as well, see if he can help with figuring this out with me.

Thanks @kltaylor for the post. I have followed your post and I also use Zoom on my MacBook while being on Fingbox network but I haven't received any warning from fingbox. I am not sure if it is happening in specific area or everywhere.

kltaylor · April 2020

From what I've been reading, it's not region locked, so consider that our copies (I have it on a iPad as well) are subject to those things. Let's keep an eye on our monitors, either way.

Has anyone else received the following, DoS Alert using Facetime?

Wi-Fi Security Alert

Answers