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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