03 May 2014

Virtual Alphaville Cybersecurity Training Facility

The small town of Alphaville, Mich., is under attack. Up to 50 hackers are trying to shut down the power grid. The local library is being used as a backdoor attack point against city hall. There's an encrypted bug being planted on the local elementary school's mainframe, and residents are finding that their desktop  computers are being turned into zombie clients, further compromising security in this normally quiet village.


Thankfully, Alphaville only exists electronically. It's a collection of virtual machines and computers networked together and assigned security levels modeled on how real towns across the country are actually configured. It exists as part of the Michigan Cyber Range, a network and classroom designed to enable the testing of cybersecurity attacks and defense methods in as realistic an environment as possible.

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