Skip to content

What student data is collected by the Cyber Range?

Note

The Virginia Cyber Range uses all collected data to help improve and maintain our services. We do not sell collected data to any third parties. For more information on student privacy, please see the article titled Student Privacy Protection.

This article provides information on the types of student data that is gathered by the Virginia Cyber Range and how that data is used. We collect data in two categories: system services and analytics.

System Services and Logs

The following list details what student data is collected in order to carry-out basic function and logging in the Virginia Cyber Range:

  • Name and Email: Instructors provide student names and email addresses for course enrollments to facilitate inviting students into a course. As an alternative to collecting this data, instructors can provide students with a course invitation code that they can use to join the course. In either case, students will associate their OpenID credential, such as Google or Microsoft, with their Cyber Range accounts for future logins.
  • User Enrollment Records: To ensure students have access to their rightful courses, we keep records of which courses each student is enrolled in.
  • Browser and OS version: Our system logs include records of our users' browser and operating system versions. This data is for troubleshooting purposes and will be retained for 6 months.
  • IP Address: Our error logs include user IP addresses for troubleshooting purposes.
  • Additional Metadata: To monitor the health of our services, our system logs track the time and user involved with any actions that are done through our platform such as logins, starting/stopping virtual machines, etc.

Website Analytics

The Virginia Cyber Range uses Matomo Analytics to help identify ways we can improve our services. With Matomo, no personally identifiable information (name, email, etc) is available. Here is a list of the data that is collected:

  • Browser, OS version, and device type: This gives us an understanding of what types of devices users access our services from, helping us identify places for improvement.
  • Anonymized IP Address: For this use-case, an anonymized version of the user's IP address (the last two bytes are masked) is collected for mapping out broad regions from which our users have accessed our site.
  • Page Activity: Page visits and referral URLs are collected to gain insight on popular articles and services.

The Virginia Cyber Range respects your privacy and have configured our analytics to respect any "Do Not Track" preferences in your browser and we make no attempt to circumvent adblockers. If your school or organization would like to block analytics tracking network-wide, your network admin can use firewall rules to block https://analytics.virginiacyberrange.org.

Additionally, if you would like to disable analytics tracking at the individual-level, you can opt out using our Analytics Opt-out page.

Have a Question? Contact Support

Important

Students, please reach out to your instructor who can submit a ticket to our Support Team on your behalf.

We're here to help you. If you still have questions after reviewing the information above, please feel free to submit a ticket with our Support Team and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.