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Remote rickroll

Posted on April 11, 2008 by mogrify

After yesterday's rickroll, I had an idea… what if you could get the victim's computer to play the evil track whenever you wanted, on demand? So today I fired up Visual Studio and put something together in C#. It's a Windows service (a program that runs in the background) that waits for an incoming UDP network packet to trigger it. When it receives the packet, it starts playing Rick Astley.

Once the service is installed and started on the victim's machine, I can start the song whenever I want using a simple little program that runs on my computer. I even worked out a way to install and start it remotely, so I never have to set foot in the victim's office or wait for them to leave their workstation unlocked.

I didn't work very hard to cover my tracks this time; when the Remote RickRoll service gets triggered, it writes "You've been Rickroll'd!" in the system log. It shows up in the regular list of Windows services too. My favorite part is that the service listens on port 1987, the year Never Gonna Give You Up hit the charts.

Update: Yep, I'm going to publish the source and everything else needed to get it running. It'll be on my geek blog next week. Stay tuned.

Update redux: See code in the ruins for binaries, docs, and source code!