About KittyScan
KittyScan crawls the internet for Minecraft servers, collects ecosystem data, and operates a honeypot to study malicious actors, helping server owners understand and secure their infrastructure.
We scan the internet for Minecraft servers and collect data to provide statistics and insights on the server ecosystem.
We operate a honeypot to attract and study malicious actors, publishing findings to help the community stay safe.
Collected data is never sold or shared with third parties. We are not affiliated with Mojang, Microsoft, or any griefing group.
Our Advocacy
When KittyScan joins a server, it sends a chat message recommending the operator enable a whitelist to protect against malicious actors. We actively advocate for Mojang to enable whitelists by default and to remove the player sample from server pings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Changing away from the default port is enough to make your server invisible to KittyScan. We operate with the premise of "if an attempt has been made to hide the server, we will respect that".
You can also append §b§d§f§d§bto your server's MOTD. This tag is invisible to players; upon detection, KittyScan will mark the server as unreachable and delete all historic data for it.
KittyScan joins servers with the username KittyScan to check whether offline mode is enabled. This does not happen frequently. Note that anyone can set their offline username to anything, so a player named "KittyScan" is not guaranteed to be us. We also do not own the official KittyScan Mojang account.
Since a Reddit thread about KittyScan was posted, at least 80 unaffiliated IPs have attempted to connect to our honeypots. The complete list of accounts we actually use is shown below.
KittyScan joins servers with the username KittyScanNya to verify whether a whitelist is active. If KittyScanNya was able to join, your server has no whitelist, meaning anyone, including malicious actors, can join freely.
Please enable a whitelist. If you need help, join the KittyScan Discord and we can assist you.
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Our Accounts
The following Minecraft accounts are operated by KittyScan. Any connection from these usernames is legitimate KittyScan activity.
- KittyScanNya
- KittyScanNyaNya
- KittyScanArchive
- KittyScan01
- KittyScanIPv6