July 13, 2026
TFTP? More like Tea, F, and Drama
TFTP Honey Pot Results
His internet trap caught mostly security companies—and commenters had jokes
TLDR: A hobbyist’s internet trap mostly caught routine scans from security companies, not a swarm of attackers. Commenters split between "that traffic is tiny" and "this is fascinating," with jokes about faxing random devices and old-school internet relics stealing the spotlight.
A month-long attempt to catch shady internet lurkers turned into a plot twist: the biggest visitors to Bruce Ediger’s tiny file-transfer trap were mostly security companies doing routine scans, not mysterious hackers in hoodies. His always-on server saw just 20 to 50 daily pings, and the big reveal was almost hilariously mundane—seven well-known firms kept showing up asking for odd little files like “a” and “file.” The community reaction? A mix of genuine fascination, nerdy nostalgia, and a little bit of "that’s cute" energy.
The sharpest hot take came fast: 50 packets a day is nothing, according to one commenter, who bragged that even internet-connected printers attract far more random attention. Ouch. That instantly turned the post from "scary internet mystery" into "tiny fish in a huge haunted ocean." But others were delighted, calling this kind of internet background noise research catnip for curious tinkerers. One commenter even escalated the chaos by suggesting Bruce should serve fake phone config files and spin up a disposable phone server so he could call the devices back, send a fax, or even dial them like it’s 1997.
And then came the comedy. One person cheered at the mention of file_id.diz, a relic from ancient internet culture, while another got distracted by a cheeky footer line that looked like a prank aimed at AI or surveillance systems. So yes, the data mattered—but the real show was the crowd: half impressed, half roasting, and fully ready to turn a niche network experiment into a comment-section variety hour.
Key Points
- •The TFTP honeypot ran for over a month on a VPS and intermittently on a home server, receiving about 20 to 50 TFTP packets per day.
- •Most of the observed UDP port 69 traffic was attributed to scheduled scans from seven security-related organizations rather than unidentified attackers.
- •The article documents distinct probe patterns for Shadowserver, Censys, Driftnet, Shodan, Palo Alto Networks, Netscout, and Internet Census.
- •Traffic attribution was performed using `whois` CIDR data and `grepcidr` to verify that log entries matched the correct organizations.
- •Timing analysis showed roughly daily probing behavior with wide variability, and the article also recorded a smaller set of irregular or cryptic TFTP requests such as `startup-config` and `masscan-test`.