FBI opens replica town to train cyberattack responses

The FBI has opened a purpose-built 22,000-square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama campus to train investigators for real-world cyberattacks. Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber Range, it includes wired homes and businesses, a data center with 200-plus servers

On the FBI’s Huntsville, Alabama campus, the training isn’t happening in a classroom. It’s happening inside a replica town—22,000 square feet of streets, buildings, and equipment meant to behave like the real thing.

The FBI built the Kinetic Cyber Range to help law enforcement practice simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks in a secure environment. The point is hands-on, using consumer and enterprise technologies that are frequently targeted by malicious hackers.

The stakes behind that practice are blunt. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than one million complaints, logged a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses—an increase of 26% over the prior year. In that same report, ransomware was ranked the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.

Opened in February 2025. the Kinetic Cyber Range is a small community built on purpose: fully furnished houses. a hotel. a gas station and grocery mart. a courthouse. a hospital. and a power company. Roads and traffic lights are part of the design too. mimicking what investigators would expect to encounter in an ordinary U.S. town.

The FBI says the facility has trained more than 1. 400 students since it opened. including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies. The agency’s pitch is that every part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in real life—but with simulated attacks contained so nothing spills out of the facility.

In the middle of all that, there’s another training layer: a data center with more than 200 physical servers, some running Windows and some Linux. The servers are meant to reflect corporate environments investigators are likely to face when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant.

Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, described the data center as the kind of place people don’t forget: “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” he said in the FBI’s write-up about the training environment.

The town’s design isn’t just about looking realistic—it’s built to stress the decision-making that comes during a crisis. The FBI says the range can simulate ransomware attacks and the real-world consequences tied to them. including the high-pressure choices investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people. such as hospital systems going dark.

For forensics training, the range also supports work aimed at extracting data from encrypted devices. The FBI says police use digital forensics to crack cybersecurity defenses of modern devices and recover data for criminal investigations. The tools used for this are described as controversial because they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that aren’t disclosed to device makers such as Apple or Google. in order to bypass protections those companies build for users.

When you put the details together—the wired town. the captive servers. the ransomware scenarios. and the focus on encrypted-device recovery—the training environment is built to compress real chaos into something that can be repeated. Investigators can practice under pressure without the attacks leaving the building.

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