US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently said that criminal attacks through the internet "could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11" — so the government is training a squad of hackers to defend against cyber-attacks through CyberCity, a virtual town complete with some 15,000 virtual people. Those virtual citizens all have email accounts, work passwords, bank accounts, and so forth, while the city itself has power plants with employees, hospitals with patients, and even coffee shops with unsecured Wi-Fi. The goal is to simulate a real-life internet landscape for a town and have the government agents defend it against attacks — for example, one scenario involves taking control of a train carrying weapons of mass destruction. As part of an ongoing series on internet threats and security, The Washington Post took a deep dive into CyberCity and the insecurities that exist which required the government to build CyberCity in the first place.