Penetration Testing the Divine: A DDoS Attack on Prayer Service
Description
This is a single-panel comic with a dark blue background. It features a cartoon character with orange hair, named Allan, who is depicted in profile with his hands clasped in a prayer position. A large speech bubble originates from him, filled with the text 'DEAR GOD,' followed by the word 'HELP' repeated approximately 50 times, suggesting a massive, repetitive plea. Below the panel, a caption provides the punchline: 'Allan doesn't actually need help. He's DDosing God to see if he can crash prayer service.' The technical humor lies in the direct analogy of repetitive prayer to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a common cyberattack method where a target server is flooded with traffic to make it unavailable. The joke treats the abstract concept of prayer as a network service and God as a server, which Allan is attempting to overload with requests. This resonates with a technical audience who understands concepts like request flooding, system limits, and the black-hat mindset of testing systems to their breaking point
Comments
24Comment deleted
God's SRE team likely implemented exponential backoff and rate-limiting on the prayer endpoint centuries ago. Allan's requests are just getting a 429 'Too Many Prayers' response
Blameless post-mortem: root cause - Heaven left allowAllIngress on; fix - add a “Thy Will Be 429” middleware before we burn the whole afterlife’s error budget
After 20 years of implementing rate limiting and circuit breakers, you realize the real distributed system that needs them is the one handling existential crisis prayers at 3 AM during production outages
Classic case of not implementing rate limiting on the prayer endpoint. Should've had exponential backoff and a circuit breaker pattern - now the whole celestial infrastructure is experiencing cascading failures. This is why you always load test in staging (purgatory) before hitting production (heaven)
Allan tried to DDoS the prayer endpoint; God returned 429 Too Many Requests and tripped the circuit breaker - turns out even grace implements backpressure
Blameless retro takeaway: omniscience isn’t autoscaling - add a token‑bucket and treat prayers as idempotent L7 calls before Allan load‑tests prod again
Allan's prayer client skipped exponential backoff - now God's endpoint is 503'ing with 'too many pleas'
Because of people like this, my prayers still not processed 😠 Comment deleted
This is not ddos. This is dos Comment deleted
it can be a ddos if we all contribute Comment deleted
A finite number cannot ddos the infinity Comment deleted
Pease dos Comment deleted
Verify you are a human Comment deleted
Why would an omnipotent entity need an [automated] test to tell humans from non-human creatures, if it is sentient enough to distinguish saints from sinners at a glance? 🤔 Comment deleted
between the god and sanctuary there's a massive network of divine stuff which is probably proxying him Comment deleted
Doesn't god have a scalable microservice for that purpose, so that his aides may query that information without bothering him? Comment deleted
It would be D DoS if he created a cult, and ppl all around the world would be praying Comment deleted
let's do it Comment deleted
For it to be denial of service, there needs to be some service in the first place 🤔 Comment deleted
Network err - host not found Comment deleted
the thing is... the protocol is udp Comment deleted
Doesn’t that still need 1 confirmation? Comment deleted
Ah only from the nearest switch Comment deleted
That's why polytheism is more fault-tolerant - because of high availability and micro-god cloud architecture. Comment deleted