[jlgaddis]

IRC was a fun venue for that one ~25 years ago.

Pop into some random channel, send "/ctcp #channel ping +++ATH0", and wait patiently... a moment or two later you would be rewarded with a flood of "signoff" messages as the users' TCP sessions to the IRC server timed out (by responding to the CTCP, they had, in effect, told their modems to hang up).

The goal, of course, was to get the highest "body count" possible from a single CTCP message.

Smurf attacks, the "ping of death", AOHell, the latest sendmail and wu-ftpd holes of the week, open proxies... the Internet was a very entertaining place for a bored teenager from the midwest back then.

Thanks for the flashback!

[acdha]

I was having a similar moment of nostalgia. Hard as it may be to believe some weeks, we have gotten a lot better at securing things.