The FBI built a replica of his small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks

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

The goal is to teach investigators in a safe environment outside the classroom through hands-on training on some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are frequently targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put training in context. The FBI’s 2025 Cybercrime Report, based on more than 1 million complaints, recorded a record $20.9 billion in cybercrime losses in the United States, a 26% increase from the previous year, with ransomware ranked as the largest persistent threat to critical infrastructure.

The FBI-created mini-town, dubbed Kinetic Cyber ​​Range, opened in February 2025, and includes fully furnished homes, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery market, a courthouse, a hospital, and an electric company — complete with roads and traffic lights — designed to mimic a real American community. Since its opening, the agency says, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.

Every part of the city is connected to efficient devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or real business, preventing any simulated attacks from spreading beyond the facility.

The scope also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers — some running Windows, some running Linux — reflecting the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a violation or executing a search warrant. “They’re cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and miserable,” Dave Beachboard, the range program manager, explains in an FBI article about the training environment.

Replica City also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people, such as taking down hospital systems.

The Kinetic Cyber ​​Range also helps train American investigators in digital forensics, which police use to penetrate the cybersecurity defenses of modern encrypted devices to extract data from the devices, often for the purposes of building a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial because they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that were never disclosed to the device maker, such as Apple or Google, to get around the protections those companies provide to their users.