How I 302 Hijacked Rand Fishkin’s Beard POSTED ON September 14th, 2007 BY cygnus

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only; attempts at facial hair hijacking can result in unintended consequences, such as pizza face or handlebar mustache syndrome, which can only be resolved by selling said ill-gotten facial hair on ebay.

I know what you’re thinking, how could I hijack a beard of someone so well-respected and well-liked in the community as Rand from SEOmoz? I was young, and I needed the money… and I was sort of bored… and possibly intoxicated.

History aside, this article should serve as a tutorial on how to protect you from possible beard hijacks, proxy-based mustache attacks, and soul-crushing soul-patch theft. The best way to instruct you on how not to get your hair yanked is to take you inside the mind of a beardjacker…

Step 1. Identify your target. A quick image search on any engine can provide a lengthy list of possible victims, or you could just go here and try to take down a heavy hitter. In this particular case, we’ve settled on our buddy Rand.

Step 2. Probe for vulnerabilities. Not unlike hanging out at a sorority’s initiation party, or a wedding of career-driven single 30 somethings, probing for vulnerabilities is an easy way to determine if you have what it takes to take down the limping gazelle. In this particular case, it doesn’t look like Rand is properly protecting his mug. How do we know? We aren’t being redirected to “beard.randfishkin” when heading straight for “emptyface.randfishkin”. Furthermore, a slight error on his facial sub_domain setup is creating a mirror of emptyface no matter what we type in, whether it be “beardofzeus.randfishkin” or “beardedclam.randfishkin”. To keep this from happening to you, always make sure to choose the facial setup you want to be associated with and 301 redirect everything else via IIS or .htaccess. A few lines of code and some aftershave would have prevented me from going any further.

Click thumbnails for a slideshow.

Step 3. Attack. I don’t want to explain exactly how the 302 attack is going to take place, but let’s just say it involves a healthy amount of a link concoction known as propecia affiliate spam, hair clippers, chloroform and some time.

Step 4. Look at the results. Aren’t they beautiful? Here’s just before we started our 302 beard hijack. Here is shortly after Google mistakenly gave me Rand’s beard.

Click thumbnails for a slideshow.

Step 5. Check on your hijack victim.

Click thumbnails for a slideshow.

As you can see, the beard is much fuller and thicker on me than it was on Rand, due to what I can only attribute to superior facial authority. One by one his whiskers were whisked away, leaving a face only a mother and MysteryGuest could love.

Since this was meant to only be educational, I have since taken down the 302 beard hijack and I’m happy to report that Rand’s condition is much improved:

Cygnus

Entry Filed under: Humor