I have multiple work laptops connected to my home network. Beginning yesterday, one of my laptops (call it Laptop A) which runs Symantec Endpoint Protection began reporting a detected Smurf Denial of Service from a laptop which I have PingPlotter 5 installed (Laptop B). I can also see a great deal of chatter coming from Laptop B. After a great deal of investigation, I found that if I stop the PingPlotter 5 Service on Laptop B, the chatter disappears and Laptop A no longer sees a DDoS attack. If I restart the service, the DDoS is immediately detected and I begin seeing network activity starting to climb again.

I am running version 5.5.8.4168 (Modification date 03-Feb-2018 16:58). This software has been installed for more than a year and this behavior has not been observed before. There has been no other software installed on Laptop B recently (within the last couple days) which I am aware of. Any idea what could be causing this type of behavior? For the time being, I have set the service to manual and am leaving it in a stopped state.