"Phishing for Gold"

is a website that I created using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript elements. My goal with this website is to show how easy it is to fall for phishing scams.

What is phishing?

It is a term to describe the action to manipulate interactions with other people to create a favorable outcome for yourself, otherwise known as “Social Engineering”. Through manipulation, phishers can try to trick someone into making mistakes and with human error, it is the key that makes social engineering work. Rather than trying to outsmart well-built and thought out layers of security, one only need to trick one layer that could make a mistake, to get access to everything. There are various “attacks” involved with social engineering where the goal is to trick the target through manipulation into revealing information without them knowing that they are handing it out voluntarily.

In Progress

Through the phishing website, it is showing what to look out for and explaining why certain information you should be careful to protect and how. I created a website that will look and feel like a regular website and have interactive components similar to other websites, but almost everything that you can click will have a purpose to trick you into putting in your information to use to hack into your life. Some challenges that arose throughout the project included figuring out how to have have an entire website display on one page, and keeping organized because I wanted the JavaScript to take in the users information, without the real ability to store any information locally or on a database, hence the restriction of keeping it all on one page, which involves a lot of unique IDs.

Final Product

The final product turned into hundreds of lines of code all connected onto one page, with lots of organization and unique IDs to keep it all working, and one semester later, I've successfully created a phishing website hidden behind a blog website that lures the user with multiple traps/chances to provide bits of information for me to "steal" and use to inform the user about the dangers of phishing scams in an informative presentation.

Technical Information

The project used elements from HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, typed by hand using a text editor, Atom.io.

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