Dundee hacking student sets up clone website in seconds

An Abertay ethical hacking student showed our reporter how a website can be cloned in a matter of seconds.

In just a few keystrokes, Oren Benshabat, 22, created a framework for phishing — acquiring information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity.

From the university’s Kydd Building he cloned a Google home page which almost exactly mirrored the original, but could be used to capture details.

“What you would do is buy a domain name, in this instance similar to Google — Google spelled with three ‘os’ or something,” he explained.

“What the human brain does is compensate for slight mistakes and just overlook them.

“That’s what leaves people vulnerable. It could be in any link or any PDF document — it’s terrifying.”

Fourth year student Oren, who has already secured a job, said pop-ups like a prompt for a software update, or even the help paperclip, can harbour malicious data.

He added: “In the same way that you have locksmiths you have people who break into houses, but you also have people who make locks and try to make places more secure.”

Around 150 students each year embark on a four-year degree in ethical hacking at Abertay.

Lecturer Dr Natalie Coull said: “It’s very much teaching students to do security testing within the constraints of the law, which means that you’ve got permission from the owner of the network or the system to do it.

“We have to try and get the ethical hacking students to think like the bad guys, to think about how a system could be maliciously or executed under a certain set of conditions.

“They also tend to be very passionate about trying to defend against malicious hackers. That’s why they do the course.”