The spam came from inside the house: How a smart TV can choke a Windows PC

[Zeedox]

The spam came from inside the house: How a smart TV can choke a Windows PC

The curious case of a living room screen making Windows' Settings app disappear.

arstechnica.com

Snow's Windows PC had "a few hiccups over the past couple of years," Snow wrote on April 19. She couldn't open display settings, for one. A MIDI keyboard interface stopped working. Task manager would start to hang until force-closed. Video capture cards had trouble connecting. As Snow notes, any veteran of a Windows computer that has had lots of stuff installed on it can mentally write off most of these things, or at least stash them away until the next reinstall.

Then, while trying to figure out why a remote desktop session wasn't working, the task bars on Snow's PC disappeared. The PC refused to launch any settings panels. After updating drivers and restarting the PC, the taskbars returned, but only for six days. Snow hunted for solutions, and after using "the exact right string in my search," she found a Reddit thread that led to a Microsoft support question, all describing the same kinds of seemingly spectral problems her computer was having over time, with no clear cause.

User Narayan B wrote in Microsoft's forum that the issue is the Hisense TV generating "random UUIDs for UPNP network discovery every few minutes." Windows, seemingly not knowing why any device would routinely do this, sees and adds those alternate Hisense devices to its Device Association Framework, or DAF. This service being stuffed full of attention-grabbing devices can hang up Task Manager, Bluetooth, the Settings apps, File Explorer, and more.

The fix is deleting hundreds of keys from the registry. Narayan B wrote that noticed his Hisense TV flooding Windows' device discovery systems before but "didn't think Windows would go for a toss due to this." Snow did the same, and everything—Task Manager, MIDI keyboard, remote desktop, even a CRT monitor she had assumed was broken—started working again.

This is how I came upon the fix for my PC; by searching until I hit the correct combination of words that provided an answer.

On a side note - Interesting attack concept found.

 

[Gomez Adams]

I've never even heard of Hisense. I had to Google it. I've never seen one either. Anywhere. Not in a store, on Amazon, nowhere.

 

[Zeedox]

They're up here. In just about every electronics and department store up here.
And;

Amazon.ca