The Final Countdown - "hacking" Rapidshare ·

A simple trick

Ok so I was paging through the magazine’s Autumn issue at a bookstore the other day. There was an article titled “Javascript Injections” in which the author described how easy it is to run javascript commands on a web page you have open in your browser window. So for instance on sites that pass data in hidden html form fields you could use javascript entered into the web address field of your browser to change the values being passed. The author showed how this could be used for a hypothetical abuse of a shopping cart system. I liked this technique but I had something much less thieving in mind for it.

RapidShare is a file sharing site most of you are probably familiar with. Like most file sharing sites it relies on ad revenue or getting the customer to pay for the premium version. An advantage it has over YouSendIt is that files you upload to RapidShare don’t disappear after a week or after 25 downloads. But there are some disadvantages to the free version – for one thing it makes you wait 45 seconds before you can download a file.

It was pretty clear from the page that some kind of javascript ran the timer so I checked out the source code. There’s a simple loop in the javascript code that controls when the link can be displayed. A variable c counts down from 45 to 0. Once it gets to 0 the link can be displayed.

So all you have to do to make the link show from the free download page with the timer on it is enter javascript:void(c=0) into your web address field on your browser (in place of the RapidShare url).

I can already hear your response. “If I am going to go through the trouble of typing in that crap I may as well just wait the 45 seconds.” That’s a good point… but why type it in when you can bookmark it? Just edit a bookmark to point to the location javascript:void(c=0)

Now when you hit the timer page on RapidShare just click on that bookmark. Bung bung. Instant presto link

ref: http://www.ohword.com/blog/96/The-Final-Countdown