Lillychans Blog

Latest — 31 Jan 2026

Setting up a VPN-only access for your Minecraft server using Pangolin

I always talk about the different ways to protect Minecraft servers from all kinds of danger. However, most of these arise from the fact that the servers are exposed to the public internet. Most of the time having your server exposed to the public internet is the only practical solution.

More issues

A Kitty year in review

The year 2025 is coming to a close and everyone is making one of these so I'll chime in. 2025 has been a truly moving year for me, with many ups and downs. Every success was accompanied by a fail. The more happy am I how the project

Introducing KittyPaper

Since the beginning, the goal of KittyScan has been to make players and admins aware of security and privacy issues. KittyBlock was an attempt to create a simple solution to minimize the data that could be collected by scanners. Today I am introducing the next logical evolution: KittyPaper. To maximize

Admins, protect the privacy of your players!

By default, Minecraft servers publish a sample of their currently online players through their Status Response which is shown by the client when hovering over the player count field in the multiplayer menu. Since this Status is given out to everyone who requests it, without prior authentication or authorization, server

The most average Minecraft name is "Saaeee"

Hey everyone, today I am back with a short blog post about Minecraft names. A side effect of the crawling done by the KittyScan project is that, over time, we see lots of individual players through the "player sample" component of the Status Response given by the game

The Azure outage from the perspective of a Server Scanner

All times in GMT+1 As you have most likely noticed, yesterday Microsoft Azure had a large outage. This is the second event of this scale in just a few weeks, as just a week ago AWS had the same thing happen to them. I do not want to open

Tales from optimization hell

With the ever growing dataset of my KittyScan project came unforeseen performance issues. How I ultimately fixed them, and how I made the process unnecessarily hard for myself is what I want to discuss in this short blog post. Let's first look at the use case these issues

50% of Minecraft servers do not use a whitelist - and that's a problem

KittyScan is a crawler of mine which searches the internet for Minecraft servers, with the goal of getting some interesting insights into the Minecraft ecosystem and how it evolves over time. KittyScan gathers this data by scanning the public IPv4 range for Minecraft servers running on the default port (25565)