How the Mysterious ScreenJesus can DDoS You

Buckle up. As I'm sure you can already tell by the title of this article, this one is a weird one. I (with the help of Adam of omg.lol) accidentally uncovered a rather concerning—and novel—vulnerability when it comes to beloved website-maker NeoCities. Those who use NeoCities are aware that whenever you upload or change a file on your site, it's registered as an event, which can be understood as a status update. This is a large part of the social aspect of the platform: you can follow others and their site updates will display in your feed so you can see people's brand new creative web designs as soon as they happen, and have a way to leave a comment. A feature of these "events" is that NeoCities grabs a thumbnail of each page that's added or changed. This gives the status update a visual element and a way for people to easily see what the new pages look like quickly. But how does NeoCities get those thumbnails? The answer is ScreenJesus—and it's also the issue that I'm going to be…