4 ms·

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

• PaulHoule 3y ago
  When I was worrying on my PhD I had a side project of fighting e-mail spam and had turned a corner of my work area into a command center. I would catch people spamming from dialups, immobilize them with a ping flood, then call the ISP and tell them “The notorious spammer Chris Knight from Los Angeles is on A.B.C.D and you have to cut them off. There were numerous problems with ping floods not the least that you need root privilege to send ICMP (even if is embodied in a setups executable) and one day it hit me I could do almost the same damage with a UDP flood and wouldn’t need any privilege. I coded up a simple UDP flood program that had no rate limiter and when I switched it on my X windows workstation became mostly unresponsive because I had saturated the Fast Ethernet, I managed to kill the program in about 30 seconds, I figure I consumed more than half the bandwidth of my Uni for that time. I guess I could have written a rate limited UDP flood program but I was so spooked by that incident that I gave up and went back to sending faxes to spammer’s moms.