The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot Replica Town on its campus in Huntsville, Alabama, built to train law enforcement in the simulation and investigation of real-world cyberattacks.
The goal is to educate investigators in a secure environment beyond the classroom with hands-on experience with the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are often targeted by malicious hackers. Numbers clarify the training situation. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, compiled from more than 1 million complaints, records a record $20.9 billion in cybercrime losses in the United States, an increase of 26% from the previous year, and ranks ransomware as the top persistent threat to critical infrastructure.
The FBI's small, purpose-built town, called Kinetic Cyber Range, will open in February 2025 and include fully furnished homes, a hotel, gas station and grocery store, courthouse, hospital, and power utility, designed to mimic a real-life U.S. community, as well as roads and traffic lights. Since opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI agents and partners from other federal and local agencies, the agency said.
Each part of town is wired with functional devices and systems that operate just like real communities and businesses, preventing simulated attacks from escaping the facility.
Image credit: FBI / YouTube
Image credit: FBI / YouTube
Image credit: FBI / YouTube
Image credit: FBI / YouTube
This scope also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers, some running Windows and some running Linux, reflecting the corporate environment investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. “It's cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and miserable,” Dave Beechboard, the range's program manager, described in FBI documents about the training environment.
Replica towns also allow the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world effects. This includes the high-pressure decisions that investigators must make when responding to incidents that could potentially harm people, such as power outages in hospital systems.
The Kinetic Cyber Range will also help train U.S. investigators in digital forensics. Digital forensics is often used by law enforcement to penetrate the encrypted cybersecurity defenses of modern devices and extract data from them in order to build a criminal investigation. The tools used to do this are controversial because they work by exploiting vulnerabilities never disclosed to device manufacturers like Apple and Google to disable the protections these companies have built for their users.
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