In the 1979 movie, “When a Stranger Calls,” the frightened teenager babysitter learns that the danger from the crazed killer is closer than she imagined, because “the call is coming from inside the house.”

While there wasn’t any violence or real danger involved, I was reminded of this movie scene when I successfully fought off what I believed to be a “denial of service” attack against my own home’s wi-fi network last month.

Over the past few months, we had noticed our wi-fi network was going off line several times a day for a few minutes at a time. Sometimes the disruption would resolve itself and the wi-fi would come back online. Other times, I had to completely reboot the Fios terminal to get the service restored.

I did all the troubleshooting steps that are outlined in the support documents provided by Verizon. None of it made a difference.

I finally called Verizon tech support, but the agent there could not offer much useful advice. So I examined the log files for the Internet router, and found some suspicious entries labeled “Possible DNS rebind attack.”

This attack, it turns out, is an attempt to fool your network into attaching to a rogue Internet domain by pretending that it is actually safe. If successful, such an attack could inject malware, viruses, or snooping tools into your system.

Fortunately, the Verizon router was blocking the attacks successfully, so there wasn’t any intrusion into my computers.

However, these entries seemed to coincide with the times that the network was dropping. I mentioned this to the tech support agent, who invited me to share the logs so that she could pass them on to Verizon’s own security technicians for analysis. She promised that they would get back to me.

When I got no further communication from them, I decided to try something else. I asked Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence tool if it could help me troubleshoot the problem, and it invited me to upload the router security logs.

Within minutes, the AI analyzed the entries and pointed out that the attack seemed to center around a specific domain name, one that is commonly associated with online video streaming services.

I mentioned to Copilot that we have several smart TVs with streaming built-in that are connected to the network. Copilot pointed out that such TVs are known to be “chatty,” frequently pinging the domain name I was seeing. It’s a resource that smart TVs use to download program recommendations and advertising.

Copilot recommended setting up the available guest network on my wi-fi and moving the smart TVs over to that network to separate them from the wi-fi signal we use for our connected tablets and computers. But the wi-fi continued to experience the dropouts.

Then it dawned on me. In my TV production studio, I have an array of three large-screen monitors connected to my primary editing workstation, and although I’m using them as monitors, all three of them actually are smart TVs.

And it turns out they were still being “chatty,” and pinging the network incessantly.

Once I moved those TVs onto the guest network, the problem disappeared. It doesn’t matter how much the TVs interfere with the guest network, since we don’t really use that.

Most wi-fi users probably don’t have as many smart TVs connected to their networks as I have, so they won’t encounter this kind of drop-out.

But if you are having trouble keeping your wi-fi online, you might take a quick inventory of the TV streaming devices that are sharing bandwidth with your computers and tablets, and see if the calls are coming from inside your own house.

If that’s the case, moving the TVs to a separate network might be the solution.

Email me at steve@compuschmooze with your networking questions and comments. Follow @PodcastSteve on all socials.

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The call is coming from inside the network