heh. well, i personally wasn't aware of anything beforehand that exploited that. but i'm only 20, so go figure
it kinda dropped into my head like a ton of bricks, i tried executing one and it worked, so i was like "holy shit!" and then i spent another few minutes thinking about how i could leverage that to get a shell... then it hit me - exported X display! so... the thing i thought was cool about it was that it was totally non-destructive and relatively simple. it took some thinking to come up with it, but it's not something ridiculously complex or anything like that. and it worked perfectly.
now, if scott ever kills ssh AND ftp...