FBI built its own replica small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks
The FBI has created a 22,000-square-foot replica town in Alabama to train investigators in simulating and probing real-world cyberattacks and conducting digital forensics in a secure environment.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has unveiled a 22,000-square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama campus, built specifically to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks. Called the Kinetic Cyber Range, the facility opened in February 2025 and includes fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company, complete with roads and traffic lights — all designed to mimic a real U.S. community.
The goal is to provide hands-on training in a secure environment, moving beyond classroom theory to work with the latest consumer and enterprise technologies that are frequently targeted by malicious hackers. Each part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business, while preventing simulated attacks from escaping the facility.
The range also houses a data center with more than 200 physical servers, some running Windows and others Linux, reflecting the corporate environments investigators may encounter during a breach response or search warrant execution. Dave Beachboard, the range's program manager, described the data center as cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and miserable.
Since its opening, the FBI has trained over 1,400 students at the facility, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies. Training includes simulating ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, such as the high-pressure decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could harm people — for instance, if hospital systems go dark. The range also helps train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, using tools that exploit vulnerabilities to bypass encryption on modern devices, a controversial practice because these vulnerabilities are never disclosed to device makers like Apple or Google.
The training comes amid a surge in cybercrime: the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on over one million complaints, recorded a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, a 26% increase from the previous year, with ransomware ranked as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.
