资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

screaming tty
     
        [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.
     
        [{Jargon File}]