If you haven’t heard of Sorta Malicious gaming before, then you’re missing out. It’s a tool that allows people to build their own malicious (or malware, depending on your terminology) website and deploy it for anonymous usage. With no need to understand the complexities of programming or operating systems, and with full knowledge of the internet’s shady underbelly – and all with none of the collateral damage that comes from a person choosing to use their real name – Sorta Malicious makes it easy for people to harness full power through anonymity in an otherwise strict realm like computer science.
In this article we will teach you how to leverage this service as an educational tool by making an online quiz about another browser extension.
What are the steps?
Step 1: Register for Sorta Malicious
Go to http://sortamalicious.com/
Signing up requires an email address and password, along with your name. You can leave the name section blank or enter anything you want. All of this information is kept private, so you don’t have to worry about it being shown to the public.
Paste in some gibberish in the third field along with your email address and password, then click “Register”.
If your account is verified, you should then receive an email asking you to confirm your account by clicking a link provided in the email. Don’t do this yet.
Step 2: Create the quiz
Go to http://sortamalicious.com/quiz/create , and paste in the URL of your quiz’s page. Check “Allow other users to take this test” and then press “Create”.
Step 3: Create the gist
Now that you have your test, we can make it into a gist. Go to http://sortamalicious.com/gist/create , paste in the link to your test’s page you received from step 2, and check that mode is set to public by updating it with “public”. Press “Create Gist” when you’re done.
Step 4: Deploy the quiz
Now you need to deploy it to Sorta. In order to do this, you need to upload your gist file here and send off a new message (using “reply”). You will then receive an email notice with your test’s URL.
Click that link, and enter in the login information you used when you created your account (email address) and password. On the next screen, choose “Deploy”, and select “yes” if prompted. If you get asked for a confirmation code, just click yes .
You’re done! You should see your quiz on Sorta Malicious now. However, you won’t be able to use it yet because it’s private, so we need to make it public.
Gist:
On the same page as before, click “gist” and copy the URL in the box there.
Paste that URL into your test’s page, under the “Direct Link” section.
Click on it, and press “Create Gist”.
You should then see the test in your quiz, as shown at the top of this tutorial.
Congrats! You have successfully created a malicious quiz on Sorta Malicious!
What are the advantages of sorta malicious gaming?
Aside from being an excellent educational tool, sorta malicious gaming is interesting as a platform in and of itself. You can take any quiz you want, making it your own, but you need only type in the same URL to do so. In addition, you can use the same password to create all sorts of different tests for different people.
You could have a malicious group test with questions about a certain browser extension, a way to find out if friends have installed some sort of software (try “Have you been installing this thing lately?”), or something more creative like a flavor text quiz that awards points for hilarious puns (try “When I saw my cat I thought ‘Doo doo doo. It’s a cat!'”).
The list goes on – you’re limited only by how creative your imagination is.
Is sorta malicious good for my classes?
By using sorta malicious, you can easily make a quiz for your computer science class without having to create it from scratch from the ground up.
What does sorta malicious do?
Sorta Malicious allows anyone to make their own website, where the main focus is on creating websites that don’t actually exist. The site in question is hosted in the cloud and only appears when certain links are clicked (although no server or database are needed for this). Sorta Malicious is a tool that is completely open source, meaning that you are free to use it for whatever purpose you see fit.
Did you like this sorta malicious quiz?
One of the best ways to interact with sorta malicious is via creating your own quiz and voting on it for others to see! Create a quiz and post it in the “quiz/create” section, then check out the list of failed tests in order to see what other people are asking! After your test passes, send me an email through sortamalicious.
