The FBI has unveiled an extensive 22,000 square-foot mock town at its campus in Huntsville, Alabama, designed to train law enforcement personnel in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks.
This initiative aims to provide investigators with practical experience in a secure setting, going beyond traditional classroom learning. Participants engage with cutting-edge consumer and enterprise technologies, which are often prime targets for cybercriminals. This training is especially pertinent as the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report revealed that cybercrime losses in the U.S. reached $20.9 billion—a staggering 26% increase from the previous year, with ransomware identified as the leading threat to critical infrastructure.
Named the Kinetic Cyber Range, this specialized town was inaugurated in February 2025. It features a variety of buildings, including residential homes, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company, arranged along roads with traffic signals, all designed to replicate a typical American community. Since its opening, over 1,400 individuals, including FBI agents and personnel from various federal and local agencies, have undergone training at this facility.
Every part of the town is equipped with operational devices and systems that mimic real-world conditions, ensuring that any simulated cyberattacks remain contained within the facility.
The facility also houses a data center with over 200 physical servers, operating both Windows and Linux systems, which are essential for reflecting the corporate environments that investigators may encounter during breach responses or search warrant executions. According to Dave Beachboard, the program manager, these environments are characterized as cold, cramped, noisy, and less than ideal.
The mock town enables the FBI to conduct realistic simulations of ransomware attacks and showcases the urgent decisions investigators must make in scenarios where lives could be in jeopardy, such as when medical systems fail to operate.
Additionally, the Kinetic Cyber Range plays a crucial role in training U.S. investigators in digital forensics, a discipline essential for overcoming cybersecurity measures on modern devices to extract information for criminal investigations. The techniques utilized can be contentious, as they exploit unknown vulnerabilities in devices produced by companies like Apple and Google, circumventing the security measures designed to protect user data.
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