Hijacking Chromecast With The Rickmote Controller

July 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

rick-astely With a simple $35 dongle that plugs right into your TV, it’s possible to enjoy your favorite TV shows, YouTube channels, and everything else Chromecast has to offer. Being a WiFi enabled device, it’s also possible to hijack a Chromecast, forcing your neighbors to watch [Rick Astley] say he’s never going to give you up.

The rickmote, as this horrible device is called, runs on a Raspberry Pi and does a lot of WiFi shennaigans to highjack a Chromecast. First, all the wireless networks within range of the rickmote are deauthenticated. When this happens, Chromecast devices generally freak out and try to automatically reconfigure themselves and accept commands from anyone within proximity. The rickmote is more than happy to provide these commands to any Chromecast device, in the form of the hit song from 1987 and 2008.

Video demo of the rickmote below, along with a talk from ToorCon describing how the hijacking actually works.

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This Image Contains A Hidden Audio Track

February 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 60 Comments

This image contains a hidden audio track which you’re very familiar with. Well, it used to. We’d bet we messed up the careful encoding that [Chris McKenzie] used to hide data within an image when we resized the original.

He’s using a method called Steganography to hide a message in plain sight. Since digital images use millions of colors, you can mess with that color data just a bit and the eye will not really be able to pick up any difference. Each pixel has had the eight least significant bits swapped out for the data [Chris] is hiding. Since the image uses 24-bit color, the largest possible change (going from 0 to 255) in those bottom eight bits will only result in a color change of about 0.15%. And that’s only for one pixel; in most cases the change will be much less.

He shows his work, both decoding and encoding using Ruby, and even provides a one-liner which lets you playback the audio without downloading anything (just make sure you’ve got all of the dependencies installed). Never gonna give, you, up…

[via Reddit]

Careless With Your Jailbreak? You’ll Get Rickrolled

November 9, 2009 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

iKee-Rickrolling-iPhone-Worm

Here’s further proof that you should understand what it is you’re doing when you go to hack your handheld. Jailbreaking an iPhone has been made quite easy to the point that a lot of folks do it without reading any of the accompanying documentation. Those who didn’t heed the warning to change the default SSH password on a Jailbroken phone might get a bit of a surprise. A worm has been unleashed that finds Jailbroken iPhones and changes the background image to a picture of [Rick Astley]. That’s right, they’ve been Rickrolled.

It’s a clever little devil that propagates by grabbing the IP address of the iPhone it is currently on, then testing all of the IP address in that family to find other devices using the default password. Luckily this worm’s activities are not what we’d call malicious. It doesn’t format the root or create a cell based bot-net (that we know of). This would be akin to the antics of searching Google for unprotected installations of MythWeb and setting some poor schmuck’s MythTV to record every infomercial ever. The point is, this could have been a lot worse, but the attack is predicated on stupidity. In our digital age, why are people leaving default passwords in place?