I'm willing to bet this was just more sloppy technical "reporting", and if we were privy to the details it's not a big deal at all. There's just too many people (smart people at that) who would raise a hand if it were anything like "Oh, the whole plane is on the same subnet" or the like.

For all we know the connection is something as simple as a box that's monitoring stats on all network traffic (packet counts, etc.) which then sends that down to the maint boxes; someone then sees a connection between all three, and the sky's a-falling.