With the touch of a button, security researcher Dan Petro can make any Google Chromecast in wireless range Rickroll its unsuspecting viewers.

While the hack is, for now, only used to pipe the memefied 80s hit Never Gonna Give You Up, it can be used to force Google's TV ristreaming stick to play any video the attacker has chosen, opening up the possibility forcing videos into people's homes that are even more distressing than Rick Astley.

Yet Google insists the bug that lets it happen is too important to Chromecast's easy setup for the company to fix it.

The device is called the "Rickmote", and Petro explains how he uses it to "hijack unsuspecting Chromecast users’ TVs, turning their Game of Thrones marathon into a 1980s flashback".

"The Rickmote accomplishes this by briefly disconnecting nearby Chromecasts from their Wi-Fi. When this loss of connectivity occurs, the Chromecast tries to reconfigure and accepts commands from anyone within proximity. The Rickmote automatically provides this configuration in the form of everyone’s favorite Rick Astley song on loop."

The Rickmote is built from a Raspberry Pi computer, with the addition of wireless cards, a touchscreen and a plastic case. When users hit the touchscreen (which acts as a massive button in the shape of Rick Astley's face), it sends out a "deauth" command to any nearby Chromecast that disconnects it from the local wifi network.

But because Google needs to make the Chromecast easy to set-up, its reaction to being booted off Wi-Fi is to create its own open wireless network. Out of the box, that means that the company can simply tell users to find and connect to the Chromecast network – but in Petro's hands, it lets him join the network first, and reconfigure it to show whatever he wants.

"This is actually a really hard problem, and it’s not clear that it’s ever going to get fixed,” he told Wired Magazine.

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