The FBI revealed one of its most secretive training facilities — a replica town that does not exist. Hidden on its Huntsville, Alabama campus is the Kinetic Cyber Range, a 22,000 square-foot replica community built to teach law enforcement agents how to handle cyberattacks in a controlled environment.
The facility features a fully furnished house, functioning hotel, gas station, grocery store, courthouse, hospital, power company, roads, and traffic lights — all the elements of an actual U.S. community. Every building is wired with real devices and systems that behave as they would in actual use.
Since opening in February 2025, the facility has trained over 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from federal and local agencies. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report logged $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, a 26% increase from the previous year, with ransomware identified as the top threat to critical infrastructure.
The Kinetic Cyber Range simulates ransomware attacks with real-world consequences — hospital systems going dark, for instance — forcing investigators to make decisions under pressure. A data center houses over 200 physical servers running Windows and Linux, replicating the corporate environments agents will encounter during investigations.
"They're cold, they're cramped, they're noisy, they're dark, they're miserable," says Dave Beachboard, the range's program manager, describing the conditions trainees face inside the data center simulation.
The facility trains agents in digital forensics and techniques used to crack encrypted devices from Apple and Google by exploiting vulnerabilities never disclosed to manufacturers.
