CyberCity has its own train network, a hospital, a bank, a military complex, and a coffee shop complete with–and this is crucial to the exercise at hand–free Wi-Fi. The town is virtually populated by 15,000 people, each with their own data records and electronic hospital files. Much of the model town literally came from a hobby shop, but the technology and systems that make it run are modeled on the real world. The power grid components, for example, are the same ones you’d find in an actual city. “It is lighting tiny little lights inside tiny little buildings,” Skoudis says, “but it’s the same technology with the same vulnerabilities.”

The model has five cameras mounted around it, feeding a live video stream for students who will run through cyber-attack missions from remote locations (this is, Skoudis adds, more like what will happen in the real world, anyway, as officials try to defuse problems caused over networks from thousands of miles away). Scenarios controlled over computers will play out on the board in this tiny town.