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 investigators in a secure environment outside of the classroom by getting them up to speed with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training in context. Drawing on more than one million complaints, the FBI’s 2025 cybercrime report recorded a record $20.9 billion in cybercrime losses in the US, a 26% increase over the previous year, with ransomware ranking as the top threat to critical infrastructure.
Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber ​​Range, the FBI’s small purpose-built city opened in February 2025 and features 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—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.
Each part of the city is connected to functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business while preventing simulated attacks from running out of the facility.
The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers — some running Windows, some Linux — that reflect 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 noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” explains Dave Beachboard, the track’s program manager, in the FBI’s presentation of 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 hospital systems going dark.
The Kinetic Cyber ​​Range also helps train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data from devices, often for the purpose 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 manufacturer, such as Apple or Google, to overcome the protections these companies build in for their users.
When you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.