The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot 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, using some of the latest consumer and business technologies, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. Numbers put education in context. FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, Based on More Than One Million Complaints, Sets Record $20.9 billion losses from cybercrime rose 26% year-on-year, with ransomware ranking as the top persistent threat to critical infrastructure.
Compiled the Kinetic Cyber RangeThe small FBI town 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 US community. Since it opened, 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 functional devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business, while preventing any simulated attacks from leaking 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. “It’s cold, it’s cramped, it’s noisy, it’s dark, it’s miserable,” explains Dave Beachboard, the series’ program director, in the FBI’s article on the educational environment.
The replica city also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and the real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could harm people, such as hospital systems going dark.
The Kinetic Cyber Range also helps train US investigators in digital forensics, which police use to break 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 defeat the protection these companies create for their users.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
