A visit to the Technology Advancement Center
Dec 9, 2025 by Thibault Debatty | 84 views
https://cylab.be/blog/462/a-visit-to-the-technology-advancement-center
A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to visit the Technology Advancement Center (TAC). The TAC is a nonprofit organization located in Columbia (Maryland, U.S.) and focused on addressing critical cybersecurity defense technology challenges. TAC serves as an intermediary and helps connect U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) and the U.S. government to the people, products and solutions needed to advance the nation’s cybersecurity capabilities.
Throughout the visit, we could clearly feel and see that the TAC team has identified and focuses on three levers of action to reach its objectives:
- small business and academic engagement
- education and workforce development and
- applied research and innovative proof of concept development.
OT 🍕 bootcamp
TACs education activities focus mainly on Operational Technology (OT) security, with for example an OT bootcamp where students discover the working of an industrial control system. During the bootcamp, participants setup a simulated pizza factory, then setup a monitoring environment (based on the ELK stack) and finally see the impact of an attack over the control network.
OT Cyber Range
The TAC also developed a few miniature OT environments to run training scenarios.
For example, the TechValley environment represents a real city simulates multiple OT elements:
- City-Wide Surveillance: Comprehensive monitoring across the entire city.
- Functional Ferris Wheel: A fully operational amusement ride.
- Live Lake: A dynamic water feature that fills and drains.
- Live Electrical Grid: Provides 24 volts of power throughout the city.
- Self-Driving Beltway: Automated transportation system.
- Fully Functional Traffic Lights and Street Signs: Realistic urban traffic management.
- Sewage Lines: Simulated waste management system.
All these services are powered by programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and can be managed in real-time using a OT network, just like in a real environment!
Final thoughts
I was really impressed by this visit as the TAC really developed an impressive set of learning tools and environments to address critical cybersecurity challenges!
References
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/technologyadvancementcenter/
- https://thetac.tech/
- OpenPLC : https://autonomylogic.com/
- PyModbus : https://pymodbus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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