FBI built 22,000-sq-ft town to train cyber investigators

Tucked inside the FBI's Huntsville, Alabama campus is a town that looks ordinary at first glance: a hotel, a gas station, a hospital, a courthouse, and even working traffic lights. But nothing here is real, and that's the point.

This facility, known as the Kinetic Cyber Range, measures 22,000 square feet and opened its doors in February 2025. All buildings have functional devices and systems programmed to respond precisely like in real-world neighbourhoods or corporations.

The cyber range reportedly trained more than 1,400 students so far, which included FBI officers and their partners from other federal and local police forces, said the FBI.

The FBI's report on Internet crime in 2025, compiled from more than one million reports, showed $20.9 billion in losses throughout the United States, a rise of 26% compared to last year, with ransomware being the number-one threat to critical infrastructure.

The lab aims to emulate how things really look on the job for investigators, hence its equipment that features a data centre housing in excess of 200 physical servers which utilise both Windows and Linux operating systems.

These server labs were called 'cold, crowded and miserable environments' by Dave Beachboard, who is the programme manager at the lab, in the very write-up from the FBI.

The mock city allows participants to experience ransomware incidents in a realistic environment, complete with the intense decisions they would have to make under pressure while conducting investigations on behalf of hospitals who fear their systems are going to go dark.

The facility additionally prepares investigators in the process of digital forensics, which includes techniques for retrieving data from encrypted devices for use in the course of criminal investigations. Some of the tools employ a vulnerability present in the devices of Apple and Google products without disclosing it to the manufacturer.