[371] in bugtraq
Re: a program named spoon
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason Matthews)
Tue Dec 6 04:28:08 1994
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 00:23:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Jason Matthews <jason@dickory.sdsu.edu>
To: Doug Hughes <Doug.Hughes@Eng.Auburn.EDU>
Cc: bugtraq@fc.net
In-Reply-To: <199412051850.MAA11408@netman.eng.auburn.edu>
On Mon, 5 Dec 1994, Doug Hughes wrote:
> I remember something about a program named spoon. Seems to be a
> hacker C program of some sort that eats up a systems resources.
> Does anybody know the origin of this program? We've discovered
> a couple of users with binary only and were wondering exactly
> what it does. Source would be helpful, but not necessary. I'm
> guessing it mallocs all available memory for a specified period
> of time.
> Was it this list?
I have two guesses:
1) It forks repeatedly thereby consuming resources.
2) It makes use of malloc() and allocates all the available
virtual memory until it detects it is within a certain percentage
of the physical limit and idles in the background.
BTW, are you sure this is not some sort of page bomb where the program
allocates and then deallocates memory in attempt to force the kernel to
'kill' processes.
Jason
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
jason@dickory.sdsu.edu San Diego State University
jason@mentor.sdsu.edu College of Engineering
jason@BOOM.extern.ucsd.edu Electrical*Computer Engineering
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following email address are no longer valid
odn@LoD.amaranth.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
