This sent me down a rabbit hole remembering the DDoS attacks the skids were coming up with in the 90s. The famous Pepsi & Smurf attacks that would spoof a connection from one server running CHARGEN [1] and send it to another running ECHO [2] and it would just send an endless flood of characters to the victim. It might have been one of, if not, the first distributed denial of service attacks. It's wild to think people would leave all the ports open on their servers that would just spew endless characters and etc. Those were the days when everyone was so open and trusting of other users on the internet.

CORRECTION: This was actually name "Fraggle". [3] Smurf involved ICMP flooding.

I remember seeing these on EFnet IRC in the 90s. Since the code is so ancient, I thought I'd share it. I'm sure these would be useless in modern times, but they're an interesting bit of internet history. It also hilarious to look at the comments and see old IRC handles you recognize. Who remembers napster before he developed the p2p software that made him famous?

Pepsi.c https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/exploi...

This site has loads of old historic exploits preserved one folder up.

Smurf.c https://gist.github.com/JasonPellerin/2eecbf1f7e49750d2249

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_Generator_Protocol?w...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_Protocol?wprov=sfla1

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smurf_attack?wprov=sfla1