Kevin McCurleyI've been playing "whack a mole" to suppress crawlers that violate robots.txt. It's pretty much hopeless, but an amusing side activity.
In going through server logs, I sometimes see requests for /etc/passwd in the web server logs. I guess I could give them something to chew on. 🤡
Ichinin 
✅🎯🙄@tragiccommons Link /etc/passwd it to /dev/urandom
noahm
Matt Blaze@tragiccommons Obligatory graybeard story. Before the web, when we shared files across the internet via anonymous ftp, the research.att.com server would happily let you fetch the ostensible /etc/passwd file, which had a short list of uses with encrypted passwords that, when cracked, spelled out a snide message.
@tragiccommons This was, as I recall, Bill Cheswick's mischief.
@tragiccommons Ah, I found a copy. https://www.mattblaze.org/etc/passwd
Norman Wilson@mattblaze @tragiccommons I thought it dated from Fred Grampp, and we left such a phony passwd file on research! where uucp could see it, years before we had an Internet gateway. I could be mistaken.
@mattblaze @tragiccommons It's certainly ftg's sort of prank even more so than ches.
@oclsc @tragiccommons That might well be. I assume the ftp.research.att.com version was due to ches, but it includes usernames that weren't there anymore when that site went live, so it probably has legacy roots.
@mattblaze @tragiccommons ches was certainly behind the ftp-able instance.
Steve Bellovin@mattblaze @oclsc @tragiccommons I don't know if Fred did something like that, though Ches likely would have known. But the 1987 hack by Shadowhawk (https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Uncovering+the+mystery+of+Shadowhawk.-a09067749) was detected by a number of people, including Fred and me, because requests to copy /etc/passwd showed up in our UUCP logs.
@mattblaze @tragiccommons Yup—Ches and I told the story in Chapter 1 of “Firewalls”; see https://wilyhacker.com/1e/chap01.pdf
Josephine Ici@mattblaze @tragiccommons we did this at the Minnesota Supercomputer Center, too. With great glee.