The Federal Bureau of Investigation has revealed a 22,000-square-foot indoor replica town in Huntsville, Alabama, designed to help agents, analysts, and forensic specialists train for real-world cyberattacks in a setting that looks and behaves like an actual community.
The facility, called the Kinetic Cyber Range, is located on the FBI’s campus at Redstone Arsenal and was built to move cyber training beyond traditional classroom lessons. Instead of only studying digital evidence from desks, trainees are placed inside realistic environments where homes, businesses, vehicles, and networks are connected to functioning systems.
The FBI’s replica town includes fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, a power company, roads, and traffic lights.
A Small Town Built for Cyber Investigations
According to FBI, the Kinetic Cyber Range opened in February 2025 and has already trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies. Each space in the facility is wired with functioning systems, networks, and devices that behave like those found in real homes, offices, hospitals, and businesses.
Dave Beachboard, the Kinetic Cyber Range program manager under the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, said the training environment is designed to be as close to real fieldwork as possible.
The FBI said the range includes ordinary-looking spaces where students decide which internet-connected devices to seize, how to work with system administrators, and how to search for digital evidence inside corporate networks.
Inside the data center, the training becomes more physical.
Digital Trends shared that the facility has more than 200 servers running on Windows and Linux systems, allowing trainees to experience what it is like to work in cramped, noisy, and difficult real-world technical environments.
Training for Ransomware, Vehicles, and Digital Evidence
The FBI’s training exercises include scenarios involving ransomware, vehicle forensics, corporate networks, and internet-connected devices. In one exercise, students handled a simulated ransomware attack that locked down a hospital network, forcing them to respond not only to the technical breach but also to the pressure of a situation where patient care could be affected.
The range also includes a vehicle bay where students practice removing a car’s electronic control unit, often described as the vehicle’s digital brain. In a real investigation, that data could help reconstruct where a vehicle has been, how it was used, and who may have been behind the wheel.
Stephanie Cassioppi, who leads the cyber training unit in Huntsville, said the work is not only technical. The FBI said students also conduct interviews with role players acting as business owners, executives, and legal teams, requiring them to explain what data they are collecting and what they are not collecting.
Why the FBI Is Making Cyber Training More Realistic
The training facility comes as cybercrime continues to create major financial and public safety risks.
TechCrunch shared that the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, recorded more than one million complaints and $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, a 26% increase from the previous year. Ransomware was also identified as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.
That context explains why the FBI is no longer treating cyber training as a purely technical classroom exercise. The Kinetic Cyber Range is meant to prepare investigators for the reality that cyberattacks can affect hospitals, businesses, vehicles, utilities, and ordinary homes.
By recreating a functioning town, the FBI is giving trainees a controlled space to make mistakes before they face real victims, real systems, and real consequences.
As connected devices become more common in daily life, the agency’s replica town shows how cybercrime investigations are now moving far beyond laptops and phones.
