The following may or may not be illegal to practice on networks not owned by the broadcaster. As such, it is purely for informational and educational purposes.

I’m certainly not the first to note this, by any means. It’s incredibly simple, and there’s no way to defend against it. This type of attack uses aireplay-ng to broadcast streaming de-authorization packets to any client on a given wireless network, or networks. Put simply, it effectively “jams” WiFi networks. If you’re within radio range of the network access point, you stream the de-auth packets to boot everyone off the network. If you keep streaming this, it becomes a Denial of Service attack because they can’t reconnect to the network while you’re jamming it.

To do this, you need a wireless card which supports packet injection and monitoring, and simply the aircrack-ng suite of tools. The command for it is

airplay-ng --deauth 0 -a [BSSID of victim network access point] mon0

There’s no way to defend against this type of attack, but the victim(s) could triangulate your position using the frequency strength of your broadcast. So, if you’re going to do this, use rollerskates.