The Federal Bureau of Investigation is unveiling a 22,000-square-foot replica city on its campus in Huntsville, Alabama, that it constructed to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating cyberattacks in the real world.
It provides investigators an opportunity to get familiar with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies in a controlled environment outside of the classroom, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. The figures help put the training into context. FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report Sets Records With More Than One Million Complaints: $20.9 billion Cybercrime damage in the U.S. up 26% from last year; ransomware is the top threat to critical infrastructure
The FBI’s purpose-built small town,
dub Kinetic Cyber Range The FBI’s purpose-built small town, opened in February 2025, consists of fully furnished houses; a hotel; a petrol station and grocery mart; a courthouse; a hospital; and a power company – with roads and traffic lights – designed to simulate a real American community. Since opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies, the agency says. This part of the city is connected by functioning devices and systems that behave like a real community or business, while preventing any fake attacks from spreading beyond the facility.
This category also includes a data centre with more than 200 physical servers – some running Windows and 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,” Dave Beachboard, the range’s programme manager, explains in an FBI article about the training environment.
The replica city also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions that investigators must make when responding to events that could harm people, such as the blackout of hospital systems.
The Kinetic Cyber range also helps train US investigators in digital forensics, which police use to extract data from devices and break the cybersecurity protections of modern encrypted devices, often for criminal investigations. The tools used for these purposes are controversial because they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to device manufacturers like Apple or Google to defeat the protections those companies create for their users.
