11 courses are classroom-ready right now. Pick the one (or several) you'd want and email us. Each "Register interest in VCA-..." button below pre-fills the subject and a short prompt so you can send in under a minute.
We're gauging interest, not taking enrollments. Cohort timing follows demand, so the courses you tell us about get priority routing. We respond to every email.
The pipeline-entry track. Every Virtus Academy student starts here. The four Foundations courses move a student from no prior computer-science background to fluent in the shell, in Python, in basic networking, and in the historical context of the 6502 era. By the end of Foundations a student has the vocabulary, the tooling, and the muscle memory to enter any Part-II track without prerequisite gaps.
View full Foundations track →Pipeline entry — 9th Grade Fall
Binary, hex, Boolean logic, computer architecture at block level, Linux shell, basic Git. Capstone: documented teardown of a discarded consumer device.
Pre-CSA-101 motivational on-ramp
No-prereq motivational on-ramp. Game emulators, ROM hacking, and the 6502 historical anchor on a laptop — no FPGA. The gateway course that makes a student ready to start CSA-101.
9th Grade Spring
Python 3 as a professional automation language. Six working CLI tools, argparse, Git as daily practice, pytest. Capstone: student-chosen automation tool.
11th Grade Fall — Cybersecurity literacy core
CIA triad, STRIDE threat modeling, OWASP Top 10, crypto literacy, coordinated disclosure. picoCTF as the weekly lab spine. Capstone: written explainer of a significant historical CVE.
The Hardware track is where students go from "a CPU is a magic chip" to "this is a 6502 I built from NAND on my own FPGA." HW-101 lights the soldering iron; CSA-101 builds the silicon-arc from NAND through the 6502; CSA-201 extends to RV32I with virtual memory and protection rings. The track produces graduates who can take a board you hand them and tell you what every pin does.
View full Hardware track →11th Spring (bridge) or 12th Fall — Hardware-FPGA capstone
Build a working computer from NAND gates up. Twelve modules: logic, ALU, CPU, assembler, VM, compiler, OS — ending with a real application running on FPGA hardware the student designed. RV32I-Lite instruction set on a Tang Primer 25K. Petzold-anchored throughout. The deepest engineering deliverable in the catalog.
10th Grade Fall — Hardware on-ramp
DC circuits, Ohm's law, breadboarding, Arduino, sensors, soldering. Capstone: Arduino data logger in student-fabricated enclosure. Bridges software to RE-101's physical layer.
Three courses across the OSI stack. NET-101 builds the packet-analysis muscle most students never get; NET-201 walks the production routing and switching every networking engineer touches; NET-301 takes the student to carrier and datacenter scale. The track interleaves with the RE track on protocol-RE labs and the PT track on lateral-movement labs.
View full Networking track →10th Grade Spring
OSI and TCP/IP, Wireshark, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, Python sockets. Students learn to see what's actually on the wire. Capstone: documented home-network map with traffic analysis.
Penetration testing as a workmanlike practice. PEN-101 walks the full kill chain from reconnaissance through post-exploitation on academy-hosted CTF targets. The lab discipline (write your own tools when commercial frameworks lie to you; document every step in a real client-facing report; map every finding to a CVE or a primitive) is the differentiator.
View full Penetration Testing track →12th Grade — Offensive Stream
Full engagement lifecycle a professional pen tester executes: scoping, reconnaissance, enumeration, exploitation, privilege escalation, lateral movement, reporting. Capstone: five-day simulated engagement with client-style report.
Reverse engineering as the academy's flagship discipline. RE-011 is the gateway (binary structure, file formats, the static-analysis vocabulary); RE-101 takes the student through a real commercial target (the Motorola SB6141 cable modem) end-to-end; RE-201 caps with burst-radio signal RE in the SDR domain.
View full Reverse Engineering track →11th Grade Spring — RE conceptual scaffolding
Hex editors, x86-64 assembly, Ghidra, CrackMes, guided firmware teardown. Conceptual scaffolding for RE-101. Capstone: professional-register firmware analysis report.
Flagship — graduate register, SB6141 capstone
Complete methodology for recovering design information, firmware, and crypto from commercial embedded systems without vendor source. PCB → SPI/I²C/UART/JTAG → SoC bring-up → firmware extraction → patch-and-reflash. Capstone: end-to-end RE of a Motorola SURFboard SB6141 cable modem.
Short single-week modules that complement the main tracks. Topical modules cover a specific CVE quartet, a single tooling deep-dive, or a current-events practitioner case. Students take them between full-length courses or as continuing-education refreshers.
View full Topical Modules track →Topical single-week module
Four 2026 Wireshark RCE CVEs (TLS dissector / SBC codec / two RDP dissector RCEs) used as anchor cases for packet-capture analysis, binary-diff RE, and dissector-engineering lab patterns. Single-week module; pairs with NET-101 + RE-101 + RE-201.