Curriculum, Information systems education

In recent years cybersecurity has gained prominence as a field of expertise and the relevant practical skills are in high demand. To reduce the cost and amount of dedicated hard-ware required to set up a cybersecurity lab to teach those skills, several virtualization and outsourcing approaches were developed but the resulting setup has often increased in total complexity, hampering adoption. In this paper we present a very simple (and therefore highly scalable) setup that in-corporates state-of-the-art industry tools. We also describe a structured set of lab assignments developed for this setup that build one on top of the other to cover the material of a semester-long Cybersecurity course taught at Boston Univer-sity. We explore alternative lab architectures, discuss other existing sets of lab assignments and present some ideas for further improvement