On April 30, 2021, a student and collaborators broadcast Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” across networked displays in Township High School District 214 and later triggered it through the district’s bell system, according to the student’s retrospective account. The student, Minh Duong, writing as WhiteHoodHacker, said the activity was illegal and warned readers not to imitate it without explicit permission.
What happened on April 30, 2021
Duong’s post says the group launched a Rickroll stream with a countdown, switched networked displays to the video, and later changed bell schedules so the song played in place of a bell. He described the event as reaching displays across District 214, rather than a single school.
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Duong described the district at the time as having six schools and more than 11,000 enrolled students. Those figures come from his account and are not independently confirmed here.
Futurism reported the incident on October 14, 2021, citing Duong’s October 4 post and contemporaneous social media. Its report repeats the broad claim that the prank involved displays and the bell system; the detailed technical narrative comes from Duong himself.
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How the student said the access worked
Duong said the group’s initial scan covered 8,388,606 IP addresses and surfaced exposed network devices, including printers, IP phones, and security cameras. That scan figure and the technical details are his retrospective claims, not independently verified measurements or the findings of an audit.
He identified Exterity AvediaPlayer receivers, AvediaStream encoders, and AvediaServer management systems as part of the district’s IPTV setup, and said the team used that system to reach networked displays. He also described weaknesses including exposed devices, weak or default credentials, and vulnerabilities in the IPTV products.
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For the bell-system access, Duong said backups and reused or default credentials contributed to access to other bell servers. These descriptions help explain the incident at a high level; they do not establish the district’s current security posture or configurations.
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Duong said the group avoided instructional time and planned the prank before AP exams. He wrote that they later sent district technology staff a 26-page penetration-test report and debriefed them. Futurism also reported a meeting with administrators and quoted Duong’s hope that the incident could lead to cybersecurity programming. These accounts describe the response, but no district statement or independent confirmation of the meeting is established by the cited reporting.
Duong acknowledged the legal risk directly: “With that said, what we did was very illegal, and other administrations may have pressed charges.” He also included this warning: “This post is for educational purposes only. Do not perform similar activities without explicit permission.”
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What this story does—and does not—show
The incident is a case study in how access to connected audiovisual and bell systems can have visible effects well beyond one computer. But the technical account is a participant’s retrospective explanation, with Futurism serving as a secondary report rather than an independent technical audit. The available material does not establish an official district investigation, audit, court record, or spokesperson statement.
It also does not establish anything about District 214’s present-day security. A prank from 2021 should not be treated as evidence of current weaknesses, and the story is not a how-to guide: probing systems or changing their settings without explicit authorization can be illegal and disruptive.
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