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Comment by NoboruWataya | Hacker News Reader

Huh, this sounds kind of cool, I like the idea of there being a few QOTD servers dotted around the internet. Shame that the first I'm heading about it is it being abused to launch a DDOS.

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You can always ssh to random hosts and read the netbanners.

Of course nearly all of them are a long paragraph or two of legal jargon that more or less boils down to "fuck off."

SSH banners come over TCP, requiring the 3-way handshake first, meaning you can't use it for traffic reflection (beyond the SYN-ACK itself).

Right, in general unless you're going to put a lot of care into the state machine to deal with network congestion/abuse it's better to stick with TCP.

I was glad to see QUIC did a pretty good job of limiting its usefulness for reflection attacks. Hopefully we’ll see more uses of UDP move to it

While not a random server in the internet, here is the start of the ssh banner on my router (before the legal "fuck off")

  _______              __           __              __
 |_     _|.-----.----.|  |--.-----.|__|.----.-----.|  |.-----.----.
   |   |  |  -__|  __||     |     ||  ||  __|  _  ||  ||  _  |   _|
   |___|  |_____|____||__|__|__|__||__||____|_____||__||_____|__|
                 N E X T   G E N E R A T I O N   G A T E W A Y
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 NG GATEWAY SIGNATURE DRINK
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
  * 1 oz Vodka          Pour all ingredients into mixing
  * 1 oz Triple Sec     tin with ice, strain into glass.
  * 1 oz Orange juice
 --------------------------------------------------------------------

Including a cocktail recipe in the login banner has been a signature of OpenWRT for a long time. Looks like Technicolor came up with their own recipe for their OpenWRT distribution.

OpenWRT stopped doing this 10 years ago, as it was too much hassle to pick a drink that satisfy everyone.

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