The Federal Bureau of Investigation has revealed details of a 22,000 square foot replica town built on its Huntsville, Alabama campus, designed to train law enforcement officers in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks against the kind of infrastructure that powers everyday American communities.
The facility, known as the Kinetic Cyber Range, opened in February 2025 and includes fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company, complete with roads and functioning traffic lights designed to mimic a real US community. Every part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in an actual community or business, while containing any simulated attacks within the facility itself. Since opening, the FBI says the range has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.
The scale of the threat the training is designed to address is significant. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, drawing on more than one million complaints, recorded $20.9 billion in US cybercrime losses, a 26% increase over the prior year, with ransomware ranked as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure nationally.
The range includes a data centre with more than 200 physical servers running both Windows and Linux systems, designed to replicate the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. Dave Beachboard, the range’s programme manager, described the conditions investigators often face in real server rooms in blunt terms. “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” Beachboard said.
The replica town allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and walk investigators through the high-pressure decisions that arise during real incidents, including scenarios where hospital systems go dark and patient safety is directly at risk. The training also covers digital forensics, the techniques used to extract data from encrypted modern devices for criminal investigations. These tools remain controversial, as they often work by exploiting vulnerabilities in devices made by companies such as Apple and Google that have never been disclosed to those manufacturers, allowing investigators to bypass security protections built to protect users.
