02:00
Take the call
Someone from "IT" phones the front desk asking for a password reset. Whatever you say, the screens flicker a minute later.
Skill · social engineering
Group experience · 30 minutes · 8 to 18 guests
An AI attacker takes down a working Las Vegas casino floor while you're standing on it. Your crew finds the intruder, kicks it out, and brings the slots back before the ransom clock hits zero.
Ransom clock · live demo
Pay $4,750,000 in BTC or the floor stays dark.
Every wrong move costs the room two minutes.
Overview
In September 2023 a crew called Scattered Spider talked its way past a casino help desk, deployed ransomware, and took slot machines, room keys, ATMs and reservations offline across the Strip. The company told the SEC it cost about $100 million. That is a mob story: a crew, a mark, an inside man, and a city running on handwritten receipts.
Operation Blackout puts you in that night. You walk onto a small, working casino floor built into the museum. The dealer deals, the slots pay, a phone rings at the front desk. Sixty seconds later the lights drop to red and a voice on every screen names its price.
From there it is the Crime Lab and the Firearm Training Simulator at once: real evidence, split-second decisions, a live opponent, and a scoreboard. Every move you make is a real incident-response skill, learned by doing it under a clock.
Good to know
What you'll do
Each beat is a thing real responders did on the MGM night. The time stamps are where they land in a 30-minute session.
02:00
Someone from "IT" phones the front desk asking for a password reset. Whatever you say, the screens flicker a minute later.
Skill · social engineering
04:00
Pull the plug or keep the floor running? Each choice shows its cost on the big board. There is no free move.
Skill · triage
07:00
Find the laptop the call came through and capture its memory before anyone touches it, with a timer burning down beside you.
Skill · volatile evidence
10:00
Three screens of sign-ins. One of them is impossible. Tag it and the attacker's path lights up across the casino map.
Skill · log analysis
14:00
The attacker mocks the slowest crew and pivots somewhere new. The bell rings: every crew rotates one station and has 20 seconds to hand off, ER-style.
Skill · handoff under pressure
17:00
Four heavy levers, one 90-second window, all four crews at once: account, network, host, cage database.
Skill · coordinated containment
21:00
The malware hides as a scheduled task with a boring name. The room votes. A wrong vote brings it back and costs two minutes.
Skill · persistence hunting
24:00
Restore from backup or pay. Pull the lever and the slots reboot one by one. The first payout gets the whole room cheering.
Skill · recovery planning
28:00
The attacker's whole playbook replays on the big board against your crew's moves, scored. Winners go on the leaderboard by the exit.
Skill · timeline reconstruction
Your crew
An emergency department never chooses who walks through the door, and a real breach is run by whoever is on shift. So the engine builds the crews at badge pickup and splits friends on purpose. Your crew is strangers, the clock is running, and the handoff is the whole game.
Group rules
Triage tags. Every finding gets a red, yellow or green tag before the board accepts it, so the crew argues priority out loud, the way a charge nurse does.
The page. When the attacker escalates, every crew's screen flashes one line. Crews decide who answers; the attacker punishes the one that ignores it.
Shift change. At 14:00 the bell rings, crews rotate stations and hand off in 20 seconds. A crew that inherits a station without the key fact loses time. This is the beat that teaches most: the room finds out what it knew was never written down.
The code call. At 17:00 all four crews converge on the breaker board. One lever each. Nobody can do it alone.
The debrief runs like a morbidity-and-mortality round. The operator asks the room one question: where did the handoff break?
The attacker
The attacker is a language model playing a ransomware boss. It watches your crews through the game engine, picks its next move from an approved playbook, and talks back in a voice it keeps all session. A room that is winning gets a second foothold; a room that is lost gets a clumsier attacker that leaves bigger clues.
Try a beat
The 10:00 beat, on your phone. One employee signed in from two places no human could be in four minutes apart. Tap the sign-in that gives the attacker away.
Cage crew · sign-in log · last 20 min
Clock 25:00
Pick the sign-in that could not have happened.
Hours
10:30AM
First session
Thirty minutes of play plus a ten-minute floor reset.
Last session
Matches the Crime Lab's window inside the museum's 9 AM to 9 PM day.
18
Guests per session
Four crews. The same headcount IBM's touring cyber range was built for.
Costs & equipment
Joey Victorino sponsors the exhibit the way a foundation sponsors the Firearm Training Simulator: the game engine, the attacker and the operator console are built at no charge and donated outright, with source. Nothing else in the room is a specialist machine: a web page on cheap tablets, a small open-weight model on one consumer GPU, used slot cabinets bought in the city with more of them than anywhere on earth. Pre-quote estimates; the first phase replaces them with receipts.
$0
Software
Engine, AI attacker, operator console, scoring, manuals and every future season: donated by the founding sponsor. The museum owns it.
$34K
Hardware, one time
One GPU box, two big TVs, six used cabinets, tablets, lights, levers, paint. Includes 10% contingency. Pays back in about two weeks.
$5K / yr
To operate
No new headcount: Crime Lab staff run it. No cloud AI, no licences, support included in the sponsorship. Spares and printing.
Equipment list
Nightly generation, not live improvisation. A scheduled task runs after close: the local model writes tomorrow's attacker (name, voice lines, opening move, taunt bank, decoy tasks). The operator skims it over coffee and the day runs on it. Live inference is only the reactive taunts, which are short and filtered.
Browser everything. Tablets, slot screens and the big board are all web pages served from one show PC. No forensic workstations, no software licences; the "memory capture" is a progress bar and a story.
One GPU. An 8B-class model on a single consumer card handles 18 guests with room to spare, because most of the session's text was written the night before.
The compact room (4 cabinets, 12 guests, 650 sq ft) comes in near $26,000 on the same engine. What the museum is really spending is wall space, not capital. A second named cash sponsor stays open for the development office.
Who builds it
This attraction needs four things in one person: real ransomware response, the team that built the original cyber range, an AI attacker the museum can trust, and a Las Vegas address. Joey Victorino is all four, and he is the founding sponsor: the software is built at no charge and donated to the museum with its source. The dependence ends at opening: he builds it, writes it down, and trains the people who run it.
Principal Consultant at IBM X-Force IRIS, 2018–2020, the years IBM launched its touring Cyber Tactical Operations Center, the precedent this experience is built on.
Microsoft DART incident responder on ransomware and nation-state intrusions across identity, endpoint and cloud. Cloud security at CrowdStrike. Every beat above is a thing he has done on a live incident.
His current work is AI that is allowed to act inside real companies: signed tools, deny-wins policy, append-only audit. That is exactly the leash the attacker runs on.
Based in Las Vegas. The build, the operator training and every seasonal attacker update are a drive downtown, not a flight.
Next step
Thirty minutes in the museum to pick the space and confirm the ticket tier. A playable prototype of the attacker follows within 30 days of a signed scope, so you see the game before you see an invoice.