The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a 22,000-square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama, campus designed to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks. Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber Range, the facility opened in February 2025 and has already trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.
The scale of the problem these investigators are preparing for is laid out in the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, which logged more than one million complaints and a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses — a 26% increase over the prior year. Ransomware is ranked the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.
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A fully wired, functional small town
The range features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company, complete with roads and traffic lights. 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 any simulated attacks from spilling out of the facility.
Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, described the facility’s data center — which houses more than 200 physical servers running Windows and Linux — in stark terms. “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” Beachboard said in the FBI’s write-up about the training environment, reflecting the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant.
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Simulating ransomware and its real-world consequences
The replica town allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions that investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people, such as hospital systems going dark. The training environment is designed to teach investigators in a secure environment beyond the classroom by getting hands-on with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are frequently targeted by malicious hackers.
The Kinetic Cyber Range also trains U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data, often for the purposes of building a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial, as they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to the device maker, such as Apple or Google, to defeat the protections those companies build in for their users.
The facility represents a significant investment by the FBI in practical, hands-on training as cybercrime losses continue to climb. By providing a controlled environment that mirrors real communities and corporate networks, the bureau aims to better prepare its agents and partners for the complex, high-stakes investigations they face in the field.
