The FBI built its own replica small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000 square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama campus that it built to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks. The aim is to teach investigators in a secure environment beyond the classroom by getting hands-on with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are frequently targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training into context. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, drawing on more than one million complaints, logged a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, a 26% jump over the prior year, with ransomware ranked the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure. Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber Range, the FBI’s small purpose-built town opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished houses, 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 U.S. community. Since opening, says the agency, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies. Each part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business, while preventing any simulated attacks from spilling out of the facility. The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers — some running Windows, some Linux — reflecting 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 the FBI’s write-up about the training environment. The replica town 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 incidents that could cause harm to people, such as hospital systems going dark. The Kinetic Cyber Range also helps to train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data from devices, often for the purposes of building a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial as they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to the device maker, such as Apple or Google, to defeat the protections those companies build in for their users. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security. He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at . View Bio