[Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random
characters at the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is
either disconnected or connected to a powered-off terminal but still
enabled for login; misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck
can start such a terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously
degrade the performance of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving
characters
are treated as userid/password pairs and tested
as such. The Unix password encryption algorithm is designed to be
computationally intensive in order to foil brute-force crack attacks, so
although none of the logins succeeds; the overhead of rejecting them all
can be substantial.