The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot replica city on its Huntsville, Alabama, campus that it built to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks.
The goal is to teach researchers in a secure environment beyond the classroom, putting them hands-on with some of the latest business and consumer technologies, many of which are frequently attacked by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training in context. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than one million tips, set a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, up 26% year-over-year, with ransomware ranked as the top current threat to critical infrastructure.
Nicknamed the kinetic cybernetic rangeThe FBI’s purpose-built small town opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished homes, a hotel, a gas station and supermarket, a courthouse, a hospital and a power company (with roads and traffic lights) designed to mimic a real American community. Since opening, the agency says, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.
Every part of the city is connected with devices and systems that function as they would in a real community or business, while preventing any simulated attacks from leaving the premises.
The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers (some running Windows, others Linux), reflecting the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re loud, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” explains Dave Beachboard, the camp’s program director, in an FBI article about the training environment.
The replica city also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people, such as the shutdown of hospital systems.
The Kinetic Cyber Range also helps train US investigators in digital forensics, which police use to break cybersecurity defenses of modern encrypted devices to extract data from the devices, often for the purpose of developing a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial, as they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to the device manufacturer, such as Apple or Google, to override the protections those companies create for their users.
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