Cybersecurity is hot, and these Washington colleges teach it

This summer, Western Washington University is building a “cyber range,” a computer lab that runs on a private computer network — reachable through the internet, but isolated from it.

On a cyber range, students can let a virus loose to see what harm it does, or run an attack against the system to find vulnerabilities, said Erik Fretheim, director of the university’s Computer and Information Systems Security Program.