Website/News

The Website/News channel is a dedicated channel that emulates an internet browser.

Benefit

• Reproduce an online ecosystem based on websites from a secure and protected environment for training

Feature

Running

Searching for websites

When you add a new tab the search page will appear, here players can search for terms on shown or hidden websites:

In article-based websites players can search for any term used in the title, subtitle or body in any new article.

When players type an invalid URL which hasn't been added to the exercise, a "No results found" page will appear as the following:

Sharing articles

In article-based websites, you can share articles within the exercise. Click the Share icon at the top right corner of any article to share on available channels for your exercise.

All website links work across all channels. Whether you copy a link from the website, paste it into the address bar, or when you click to share article, both the URL and generated short link will be persistent.

Link
Copy	Copy link generates an internal link that can be pasted anywhere in your exercise and it will link to the referenced article. It will not work outside the Virtual Desktop
External	External link generates a link that can be used outside the Virtual Desktop, can be referenced in reports or other exercise documentation

View website details

View the website details by clicking the three dots upper right in the Website/News channel, or by clicking the customisable icon.

Note that when a website is hacked, the icon will never appear but the three dots can be accessed or not, depending on your configuration.

Hover over URL

Participants can investigate potential phishing emails by verifying the legitimacy of a link by hovering over it to reveal the actual URL:

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Designing

How to (Configuration)

There are two stages of configuration for the Website/News channel:

1. Configuring an individual website:

• Website URL

• Search results

• What happens when it's hacked

• Past articles

• Style (i.e. the look)

1. Configuring the website channel:

• If a website should be visible or only found by search

• If the website is visible, where it appears in the channel tab order

Configuring an individual website

Each website is a persona that has been set as an organisation. To add websites, create a persona for each site.

The website options won't appear until you check the Is organisation box.

Here you'll find all the different options for designing with the Website/News channel:

Website configuration

The basic information you need to provide for a website is:

• Website name - what the site will be called

• URL - this is how the site will be available

• http or https - only change to http if you need to show the website as unsafe

The other details of configuration are for other purposes.

Search results

Conducttr prides itself on realism and for some exercises the Website/News channel will act as it does in real life, with no pre-opened pages. This requires players to search for information as they would on the web.

The following fields affect the ability to find a website and it's search results:

• Website description is what's shown in the search results and is included in the search

• Keywords - use these if you need the website to be displayed in search results for topics not specifically mentioned in the description or any articles (past and present)

• Ranking - when websites return similar results, this control determines which is shown higher in the results list

• Paid promotion - this ensures the site ranks highest but the search result displays a label saying it's a paid search result.

Display options

These are the options you have on the display options page:

• Website type - article type is preferred because everything is self-contained in your simulation space. The "use URL" is available to embed other "real" websites into your browser channel. This can be very helpful but many sites prevent embedding for security reasons so it won't work in all cases

• Page details - this allows additional information about the website to be displayed on investigation by the player

• Hacked website - this allows you to upload an image or select one of our pre-made images to be displayed when the website is hacked

Past articles

You need at least 1 past article if you want the website to be displayed before you publish anything from the Master Events List (MEL):

The purpose of the past articles is to make the website look credible and provide context to this persona/organisation. The timestamp on the article can make some difference to the realism or storytelling of your exercise. You can set an absolute Date and time or one that's Relative to the publication of the exercise.

Style

Click the pencil in the style page to configure how the website page will look:

Bulk changes

If you have a lot of websites and want to check across them all or configure in bulk, export to a spreadsheet, manipulate and reimport:

Configuring the Website/News channel

Channel tabs

There can be a lot of websites in large exercises and so you're provided with a lot of options for how websites are made available or not.

Tabs configuration

Decide which websites should be active or inactive and if they should appear as an open tab at the start of the exercise.

You need past article(s) on your website for it to be displayed at the start of an exercise, otherwise there is no content to display.

Order of tabs

There are various options for deciding the order of websites in the open tabs at the start of the exercise.