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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

You have to be very careful when running this on the telnet port.

I had a server set to spew a full color ANSI Nyancat at you when you telneted in. When the Mirai botnet was in full swing, I was pushing 5+ Mbps of Nyancat down to peoples infected webcams and killing my servers CPU.

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Surely some enterprising hacker can optimize Nyancat so that a normal server can saturate a gigabit connection without killing the CPU.

"Line Rate Nyan via Direct Networking"

  ncfd = open("/dev/nyancat", O_RDONLY);
  while (...) {
    sendfile(sockfd, ncfd, ...);
  }

No way you can open the nyancat device as read-only. Clearly, it only opens as O_ORLY.

I can't seem to edit my post anymore, but the machine in question was a tiny little VM used as an SSH jump host. The specs were minimal. It was the only machine that wasn't firewalled to hell and back, which is why I did the Nyancat there.

I'm working on deploying an enterprise grade NaaS solution across a large cluster of servers, stay tuned!

I'm sorry, that's terrible, but this sounds hilarious

ok, I've stopped laughing now and and cleaned up the spilled drink. This is brilliant. You need to team up with a CDN and get them supply cats from the nearest available node.

"Unleash the Nyancat!" as they say...

Basically don't offer hackers any data amplification attacks, never respond with more data than it took for the attack to make the request.

What? For data amplification attacks to work you need to spoof IP addresses, which is almost impossible with TCP (telnet uses it), GP was a victim of a plain old DDoS.

Maybe the data usage would have alerted the infected.

Someone with a cheap infected webcam is not going to notice 1 kB of extra data. Nobody would.

I laughed so hard. Sorry...

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