nwjs wants access to nonsense domains

I'm running PIA v80 on a Mac running Sierra 10.12.6. I'm also running the Little Snitch network monitor, which checks incoming and outgoing connections. Little Snitch and PIA coexist quite happily: whenever I launch PIA, Little Snitch asks if it's OK for PIA to connect to a particular PIA VPN server, I tell it 'Yes', and everything works fine. Because the PIA executable isn't signed, I can't tell Little Snitch to permanently authorize the connection, but that's not a real problem.

Lately, Little Snitch has started warning me that nwjs, apparently a component of PIA, wants to open a connection to various domains with nonsense names. This happens when PIA is not active, usually when my network connection changes. By 'nonsense names', I mean that the domain that nwjs claims to want to connect to is typically a random or apparently-random string of characters with no TLD, such as 'koecfzkiitbaq' (not an actual example, but I've changed a few of the characters in case that string encodes any private information).

Denying the connection doesn't seem to cause any problems.

Is this normal behavior and, if so, what's going on?

Comments

  • This is likely due to the auto connect feature. If you take at this thread it will explain a bit more.

    Hope that provides some clarification!
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