The FBI built its own replica of a small town to simulate real-life cyber attacks

The FBI is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot replica city on its campus in Huntsville, Ala., that it built to train law enforcement agencies to simulate and investigate real-life cyberattacks.

The goal is to train investigators in a secure environment outside of the classroom, while learning about some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. Numbers put learning into context. FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than a million complaints, sets record 20.9 billion dollars US cybercrime losses rose 26% year-over-year, and ransomware is recognized as the top persistent threat to critical infrastructure.

Duplicated Kinetic Cyber ​​RangeA small purpose-built FBI town opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished homes, 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 American community. Since opening, the agency reports, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI employees and partners from other federal and local agencies.

Each part of the city is connected by functioning devices and systems that behave like a real community or enterprise, while preventing any simulated attacks from spreading outside the facility.

The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers—some Windows, some Linux—representing the corporate environment investigators might 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,” explains Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, in an FBI description of the training conditions.

The replica city also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the tough decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could harm people, such as hospital systems being compromised.

Kinetic Cyber ​​​​Range also helps train US investigators in digital forensics, which is used by police hack cyber security protections encrypted modern devices to extract data from devices, often for the purpose of building a criminal investigation. The tools used to do this are controversial because they work by using vulnerabilities that are never reported to device manufacturers like Apple or Google to defeat the protections these companies create for their users.