Virginia Cyber Range marks the ninth year as a leader in cybersecurity education, outreach, and workforce development

FY 2025 marks the Virginia Cyber Range’s ninth year as a leader in cybersecurity outreach and education. The Range provides web-based virtual machines that offer students a safe, isolated environment to explore cybersecurity concepts hands-on. Through these virtual operating systems, learners engage with the Cyber Range’s educational courseware—supporting its mission to strengthen cybersecurity education across Virginia’s public high schools, colleges, and universities. By cultivating knowledge and skills in secure environments, the Cyber Range helps shape the next generation of cybersecurity professionals in the Commonwealth and beyond.

The Cyber Range hosted 13 outreach events during FY 2025:

• Nine Capture the Flag competitions at the local, state, and national level, including the Virginia Collegiate Championship
• Two teacher camps to prepare K-12 teachers to teach cybersecurity courses
• The 7th annual Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference, which was held for the first time at Virginia Tech

Continuing to provide top-of-the-line services, their team is committed to sustainable, dependable, and user-friendly courseware and virtual environments. In addition to expanding its catalog of new operating systems and pre-installed software, the Cyber Range upgraded its back-end infrastructure, replacing the Squid proxy environment (used to isolate student Cyber Range environments from the open internet) with new Amazon Web Services instance types. The latter resulted in reduced costs and improved reliability. Additionally, the new Cyber Range Exercise Area Snapshot Management capability improved the student experience by allowing instructors to modify, snapshot, and deploy exercise environments to their students from within the platform.

Pictures from the 2024 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg.