I Can Haz Gratitude

Great blog post about the burdens of running a tiny piece of software that became a critical piece of global infrastructure.

There was a phase for a few years where malware authors kept writing malware that would call out to icanhazip.com to find out what they had infected. If they could find out the external IP address of the systems they had compromised, they could quickly assess the value of the target. Upatre was the first, but many followed after that.