[Gh0ztt]

So today I come home and notice that my cable modem is not working. I then discover that there is a message on my phone from the cable company stating that some "irregular" activity was detected and that they have suspended my service until I call them.

So I call in and talked to somebody who actually seemed pretty knowledgable (which is unusual in my experience). He explained to me that some device connected to my cable modem had made 1300+ DHCP requests within 30 minutes earlier in the day. I explained to him that I only have a laptop that I carry with me and also an iMac and a couple of game systems that use the router.

I don't think anything on the iMac or the game systems was causing the router to make DHCP requests out the WAN port. I checked my laptop and it couldn't even connect to the wireless network. I then ran the Airport Utility, and it could not find the router. I ended up having to do a hard reset on the Airport and reconfigure everything.

I think somehow my Airport went "haywire" and started flooding the WAN network with DHCP requests and at the same time became dead to my internal network! Anybody else experience anything like this???

[ghporter]

I will bet that you don't have enough security set up on your base station, and that some unknown user was hijacking your wireless network for unknown, nefarious purposes. It is also possible that something in the router's firmware went stupid and started banging at the ISP with DNS requests, which would explain why you needed to reset the base, but I'm not totally convinced of that.

Do you have ANY security set up on your AirPort base? Have you set a decent password on it?

[Gh0ztt]

Yes. When this happened I was running the base station with WPA2 and a very strong password along with MAC address filtering.

[DaddyD]

It's happened to me at least three ime now. My cable company finally shut off the modem. I was also using wpa2, as well as MAC address restrictions. I haven't been able to find any other mention of this problem any where else.

[Simon]

Is your Airport base station set up in bridge mode? If so the flooding could have come from a LAN client.

[nerd]

Has this happened again to you guys? I was going to pick one up tomorrow since there's a nice UPnP bug in DD-WRT that won't open the ports for more then 1 iChat audio conference.

[ghporter]

UPnP is poo on a stick. It's unsecure, unintelligent, and unhelpful in many instances. You could simply open the required ports yourself you know...