The FBI is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot replica campus it built in Huntsville, Alabama, to train law enforcement agencies in real-world cyberattack simulation and investigation.
The goal is to train investigators in a secure environment outside of the classroom while gaining hands-on experience with the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training in context. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, with more than one million complaints, set a record 20.9 billion dollars In US cybercrime losses, with a 26% jump from the previous year, ransomware ranked first among persistent threats to critical infrastructure.
Dubbed kinetic cyber rangeThe FBI’s purpose-built mini-town opened in February 2025 and is designed to mimic a real US community, complete with houses, a hotel, a gas station and convenience store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company with roads and traffic lights. Since opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI agents and partners from other federal and local agencies, according to the agency.
Each part of the city is equipped with working devices and systems that behave like a real community or business and prevent any simulated attacks from spilling out of the facility.
The lineup also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers—some Windows, some Linux—representing the corporate environments investigators might 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 range’s program manager, in an article about the FBI’s training environment.
The replica campus also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions investigators must make when responding to potentially life-threatening incidents such as blackout of hospital systems.
Kinetic Cyber Range also helps US investigators train in digital forensics, which is used by police. breach cyber security defenses of modern devices encrypted to extract information from devices, often for the purposes of establishing a criminal investigation. The tools used to do this are controversial because they exploit vulnerabilities never disclosed to device manufacturers like Apple or Google, bypassing the protections companies have built in for their users.
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