On its campus in Huntsville, Alabama, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is revealing a 22,000squarefoot replica town that it constructed to teach law enforcement how to mimic and look into actual cyberattacks.
The goal is to provide investigators with handson experience with some of the newest consumer and enterprise technologiesmany of which are regularly targeted by malevolent hackersin a safe setting outside of the classroom.The instruction is contextualized by the numbers.Based on nearly a million complaints, the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report reported a record $20.9 billion in cybercrime damages in the United States, a 26% increase over the previous year. Ransomware was identified as the most persistent danger to vital infrastructure.
The FBI’s small, purposebuilt town, known as the Kinetic Cyber Range, opened in February 2025 and includes fully furnished homes, a hotel, a grocery store and petrol station, a courtroom, a hospital, and a power company. It is supposed to resemble a real American hamlet and includes roads and traffic lights.More than 1,400 students, including FBI employees and partners from other federal and local organizations, have received training at the facility since it opened, according to the agency.
Every area of the town is equipped with working systems and gadgets that act like they would in an actual business or community while keeping any simulated attacks from escaping the premises.
Every area of the town is equipped with working systems and gadgets that act like they would in an actual business or community while keeping any simulated attacks from escaping the premises.
A data center with over 200 physical servers, some running Linux and others Windows, is also included in the range. These servers represent the corporate settings that investigators are likely to come across while responding to a breach or carrying out a search warrant.According to Dave Beachboard, the program manager at the range, the training atmosphere is “cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and uncomfortable.
The FBI can also utilize the replica town to model ransomware assaults and their realworld repercussions, such as the difficult choices investigators must make when reacting to situations that could endanger people, such hospital systems being down.
Additionally, the Kinetic Cyber Range aids in the training of American investigators in digital forensics, a technique used by law enforcement to breach the cybersecurity defenses of contemporary encrypted devices and retrieve data from them, frequently in order to develop a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are contentious since they work by taking advantage of flaws that device manufacturers, like Apple or Google, are never made aware of in order to circumvent the safeguards such firms put in place for their customers.
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