The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot replica city at its Huntsville, Alabama campus that it built to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks.
Its purpose is to introduce investigators to some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies in a safe environment beyond the classroom, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training into context. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than one million complaints, recorded a record $20.9 billion loss in US cybercrime, up 26% from the previous year, with ransomware ranked as the top threat to critical infrastructure.
Known as the Kinetic Cyber Range, the FBI’s miniature purpose-built city opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished homes, a hotel, a gas station and grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital and a power company – complete with roads and traffic lights – designed to mimic a real American community. The agency says that since opening, 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 with 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 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,” Dave Beachboard, the range’s program 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 to break the cyber security protections of encrypted modern devices, often for the purposes of criminal investigations. The tools used for this are controversial because they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to device manufacturers like Apple or Google, in order to defeat the protections those companies create for their users.
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