The FBI Built a 22,000-Square-Foot Fake Town to Simulate Live Cyberattacks

Tucked inside a massive facility on the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, sits a town that looks entirely ordinary at first glance. It features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery store, a courthouse, and a hospital, all connected by roads with working traffic lights. But nothing in this community is real. It is a 22,000-square-foot replica built for a single purpose: to be relentlessly hacked, breached, and infected with malware.[1][5]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has officially unveiled the "Kinetic Cyber Range," a life-size, fully functional mock city designed to serve as a high-stakes training ground for cybersecurity investigators. Opened in February 2025, the facility allows law enforcement personnel to practice responding to live cyberattacks in a realistic, physical environment rather than a sterile classroom.[2][4][5]

For decades, the FBI has utilized a famous mock town in Virginia known as Hogan's Alley to train agents in physical combat, tactical driving, and traditional law enforcement scenarios. The Kinetic Cyber Range serves as the digital successor to that concept. Every building in the Huntsville facility is wired with functioning devices, networks, and systems that behave exactly as they would in a real American community.[1][3][5]

At the heart of the replica town is a mock data center housing more than 200 physical servers running both Windows and Linux operating systems. This setup reflects the complex corporate environments that investigators encounter when responding to major breaches or executing search warrants.[2][3][4][5]

Dave Beachboard, the program manager for the Kinetic Cyber Range, noted that the server rooms are intentionally designed to be "cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and miserable." The goal is to replicate the exact, high-pressure conditions that digital first responders face in the field, ensuring that their first encounter with a chaotic server room does not happen during an actual crisis.[3][4][5]

Historically, the Bureau's cyber training was heavily theoretical and confined to the classroom. Agents would sit at desks, process loose media or cell phones, and learn about network architecture through presentations. The new Huntsville facility turns that model inside out, forcing trainees to interact with live Active Directory environments, firewalls, and email servers while under simulated duress.[4][5]

The creation of the Kinetic Cyber Range is a direct response to the escalating scale and severity of digital threats. According to the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, cybercrime losses in the United States hit a record $20.9 billion last year, representing a 26 percent jump from the prior year.[2][3][6]

Ransomware remains the most pressing ongoing threat to critical infrastructure, and the facility is specifically tailored to address it. The mock town allows agents to practice responding to ransomware attacks on the replica hospital, simulating scenarios where medical systems go dark and investigators must make rapid decisions that impact patient safety, not just technical recovery.[3][5][6]

By simulating an entire interconnected community rather than a single isolated server room, the FBI is training agents to understand the cascading effects of modern cyberattacks. Trainees can observe firsthand how a breach at the local power company ripples outward to affect the hospital down the street, and how a localized ransomware demand creates pressure that extends far beyond a single keyboard.[3][4]

Beyond network defense, the facility also provides extensive training in digital forensics—the complex process of extracting data from encrypted devices for use in criminal investigations. In one exercise, students in an eight-week forensic examiner course are required to physically remove a vehicle's main computer and extract potential evidence from the hardware.[2][3][5]

The digital forensics curriculum also covers the extraction of data from consumer smartphones and internet-of-things (IoT) devices found inside the replica homes. Trainees must enter a house brimming with connected devices and make rapid, legally sound decisions about which hardware to seize and which to leave behind.[4][5]

This specific aspect of the training has drawn scrutiny from digital privacy advocates. The forensic tools utilized at the facility often work by exploiting undisclosed vulnerabilities in consumer devices manufactured by companies like Apple and Google, defeating the very protections those companies build to secure their users' data.[2][3]

To ensure that the highly advanced malware and ransomware used in these training exercises do not cause actual harm, the entire Kinetic Cyber Range is strictly air-gapped. The facility's networks are physically isolated from the outside internet, preventing any simulated attacks or malicious code from escaping the building.[3][5]

The hands-on approach has proven highly sought after across the federal government. Since its opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students. While it is operated by the FBI, the range also hosts personnel from NASA, the U.S. Army, and various state and local law enforcement agencies.[2][4][5]

As cybercrime continues to evolve from isolated data theft to systemic attacks on physical infrastructure, the need for realistic, stress-tested training environments has never been greater. The Kinetic Cyber Range represents a necessary evolution in how the United States prepares its digital first responders, ensuring they are ready for the moment when theoretical knowledge must be applied to save a real-world city.[4][5]