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What is the Virginia Cyber Range?

The Virginia Cyber Range is a Commonwealth of Virginia initiative to enhance cybersecurity education for students in the Commonwealth’s public high schools, colleges, and universities. The Virginia Cyber Range seeks to increase the number of fully prepared students entering the cybersecurity workforce in operations, development, and research. The Virginia Cyber Range provides an extensive Courseware Repository for educators and a cloud-hosted Exercise Area or "Range" environment for hands-on cybersecurity labs and exercises for students.

Cyber Range Features

The Cyber Range offers a wide variety of resources available to you and your students. A couple of our key features are detailed below:

Courseware Repository

  • Course materials are offered in modular form to allow flexible adoption of offerings.
  • Indexed and searchable.
  • Contains course content such as syllabi, lesson plans, presentation slides, and representative homework exercises and exams.
  • For more information, please visit our Courseware Repository.

Exercise Area

  • Students access Range VMs through web browsers; no special software needed.
  • Cloud-based approach allows fast deployment and scalability.
  • Eases the burden on Virginia schools of providing infrastructure for cybersecurity labs.
  • More large-scale exercises and a capture-the-flag environment are available. For more information, please see the article titled Cloud CTF Overview.
  • Resources are provided at no cost to Virginia public high schools, colleges, and universities.
  • If you're interested in getting a bit more familiar with the Range, please visit our Exercise Area for some hands-on experience.

Goals of the Cyber Range

The Virginia Cyber Range was proposed by Governor McAuliffe in spring 2016 as part of his vision to boost Virginia's cybersecurity industry through strategic educational investments. The Cyber Range is led by an executive committee representing public institutions that are nationally recognized centers of academic excellence in cybersecurity within the Commonwealth.

In accordance with these goals, access to Virginia Cyber Range resources is limited to faculty and students at Virginia high schools, colleges, and universities. However, the U.S. Cyber Range offers the same resources nationwide to schools and organizations that do not qualify for the Virginia Cyber Range use.

Leadership

The Virginia Cyber Range is led by an executive committee representing public institutions that are nationally recognized centers of academic excellence in cybersecurity within the Commonwealth of Virginia. The colleges and universities that are designated as NSA/DHS Cybersecurity Centers of Academic Excellence or DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) National Centers of Digital Forensics Academic Excellence can be found in our About the Virginia Cyber Range article.

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.