Microsoft RickRolls Wi-Fi Network Leechers

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference Wi-Fi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local Web server containing some Rick Roll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."

Comments

It could have been worse...

[Mattskimo]

At least it wasn't Soulja Boy.

Evil

[DeBaas]

Rick Rolling, told you Microsoft is evil ;-)

Re:Evil

[sycorob]

Am I the only one that's terrified to click on any links here?

Re:Evil

[WoodenTable]

Why yes, I DO go to youtube.com for all my firefox plugins! I imagine it will be extremely satisfying to finally have something that will protect me from rickrolls, once I get around to clicking on that link.

Re:Just for fun

[stonedcat]

Chair throwing video?

ObRoll

[wiredlogic]

Just to get things rolling. Here is the tasteful mashup with Nirvana.

Can you spell DoS?

[nuckfuts]

From TFA:

So we scheduled this script to run each minute to generate a list of offending MAC addresses.

We reasoned that if you had a lot of mappings, and that a large proportion of those mappings were to a lot of distinct remote hosts, and largely not idle, that you are probably a Torrenter. OTOH, if you had, say, 20 connections open to a single host or a low number of hosts then this is probably quite fine.

These scripts output a list of bad MACs, that we then just dropped into a block list in the core switches.

And there you have it. The culprits fingered and booted off the network. Of course, they then just changed their MAC addresses, in which case they were then re-identified as soon as their utilisation crept up, and the new MAC was banned.

This approach will work fine until one of the culprits decides to spoof the MAC address of your DNS servers (or whoever else they want to f*ck with) and gets them "booted off the network".

TBF with a big bucket-Howls of pain.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I still fondly remember the howls of dismay from the leechers when I turned it... they just couldn't understand why their downloads start at 20mbits/second but slow down to a crawl almost straight away :)"

You wouldn't happen to have an audio copy by any chance?

wait

[circletimessquare]

"It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too -- worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past."

correct me if i'm wrong, but rickrolling implies its just rick astley singing about how he won't let you down, right?

so what the heck is he referring to in the quote above? did they distribute 1080p video of ballmer in his underwear singing karaoke and throwing chairs?

speaking of which, a GIS for ballmer is not exactly flattering

http://images.google.com/images?q=ballmer

who would have guessed a GOOGLE image search wouldn't be flattering to steve ballmer?

i wonder what a bing image search for ballmer would... jesus what am i doing, better stop now before i run into rule 34

Re:Just for fun

[Lars T.]

Suggestions please for equivalent at Apple & Linux events?

Force install of Win ME.