The FBI has revealed a 22,000-square-foot replica town in Huntsville, Alabama, where investigators train to respond to cyberattacks involving homes, businesses, hospitals, vehicles, and critical infrastructure.
Known as the Kinetic Cyber Range, the controlled facility gives law enforcement personnel hands-on experience with functioning technologies while preventing simulated attacks from reaching outside networks. It opened in February 2025 and has trained more than 1,400 students from the FBI and partner agencies.
Replica Town Simulates Connected Communities
The FBI detailed the facility in an official report. The indoor town includes furnished houses, hotel rooms, a grocery mart, a gas station, a courthouse, a hospital, a power company, roads, and traffic lights.
Each area contains working devices, networks, and systems that behave like the technology found in real communities. Investigators can practise identifying digital evidence, responding to intrusions, and deciding which devices to examine during an investigation.
The range is isolated from the public internet. This allows trainees to use malware and simulate attacks without the activity spreading beyond the facility.
Data Centre Recreates Corporate Conditions
The town includes a data centre containing more than 200 physical servers running Windows and Linux. The setup reflects the environments investigators may encounter when responding to a company breach or executing a search warrant.
Program manager Dave Beachboard said real data centres are often cold, dark, noisy, cramped, and uncomfortable. Recreating those conditions prepares students to locate and examine systems under the physical pressures they may face in the field.
The facility also includes vehicle systems and connected consumer devices. Investigators can practise extracting digital evidence from automotive control units, home networks, business systems, and other equipment.
Ransomware Exercises Add Real-World Pressure
The FBI can simulate ransomware incidents involving essential services. One exercise placed trainees inside a hospital scenario where computer systems stopped working and patient care appeared to be at risk.
These exercises require investigators to handle both the technical response and the people affected by the incident. They may need to trace how malware spread, preserve evidence, communicate with administrators, and make decisions while services remain disrupted.
The training comes as reported cybercrime losses continue to rise. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report combined more than one million complaints and recorded $20.9 billion in reported U.S. losses, an increase of 26% from the previous year.
Ransomware remained the leading ongoing cyber threat to critical infrastructure, according to the report.
Digital Forensics Remains Controversial
The Kinetic Cyber Range also supports digital-forensics training. Investigators use forensic tools to retrieve evidence from encrypted phones, computers, vehicles, and other modern devices during criminal investigations.
Some forensic systems work by using software vulnerabilities to bypass security protections. These methods have drawn criticism because the weaknesses may not be disclosed to manufacturers such as Apple or Google, leaving the same flaws available for others to exploit.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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