Sad way to be famous

My web site is not the Library of Congress or SecurityFocus, but I try to make it mostly a technical resource site with limited but otherwise solid content. I'd love to think that I stand out for my real research works, such as Realtime Proxy Abuse Triangulation or my better tools like nbtscan.

But noooooooo.

For as long as I can remember, by far the most common Google search strings that bring visitors to my site have been for a lame bit of perl code I wrote: AOL IM Password Decoder. This tool only decodes an obscured password found in the registry, and I wrote it as part of my suite of penetration testing tools. I have no way of getting any random person's password.

A side effect of this is that at least once a month, when I sign onto my AOL IM account, I get a "Who are you?" IM from somebody I've never heard of. I finally figured out that people were passing around a link to my tool, and I was getting added to their buddy lists. I'm not on AIM very often, so when I showed up, people would ask who the hell I was.

This is all very bizarre, and quite depressing. About 9% of my searches are for "AOL passwords", with the next in line being nbtscan at 2%.

What a way to be famous.

Posted by Steve at February 25, 2003 06:23 PM | TrackBack