EVERETT — In a room on the Washington State Everett campus, students practice defusing cybersecurity threats using a miniature model city with skyscrapers, a power plant, office buildings, a train, homes and a Ferris wheel.
During a demonstration, alarms ring and the city lights go out as electricity is cut off by hackers.
Cybersecurity professor Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu shows several racks of servers students will need to go through to reprogram computers and find controllers to restore electricity.
Lu is proud of the state-of-the art miniature city security platform. He said the platform purchased by Washington State for the cost of $100,000 is one of two in the world.
“The other is in some government agency somewhere,” he said in an interview, not knowing if it’s the CIA, FBI or some ot