The FBI built a fake town to train agents for cyberattacks. It has a hospital, a power company, and 200 servers.

TL;DR

The FBI built a 22,000 sq ft replica town to train agents on live cyberattacks. It has a hospital, houses, and 200 servers. 1,400 students trained since Feb 2025.

The FBI has revealed a 22,000 square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama, campus built to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks. The Kinetic Cyber Range opened in February 2025 and has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.

The facility features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company. It has roads and traffic lights. Every building is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real US community, while preventing any simulated attacks from escaping the facility.

The range includes a data centre with more than 200 physical servers, some running Windows, some Linux, reflecting the corporate environments investigators encounter during breach responses and search warrants. “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” said Dave Beachboard, the range’s programme manager, describing the conditions investigators need to train for.

The purpose is practical. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged a record $20.9 billion in US cybercrime losses, a 26% jump over the prior year. Ransomware ranked as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure. The Kinetic Cyber Range lets agents practice responding to ransomware attacks on a hospital where systems go dark and real decisions about patient safety must be made, not just technical ones.

The facility also trains investigators in digital forensics, the process of cracking the security of encrypted devices to extract data for criminal investigations. The tools used for this are controversial. They work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to device makers like Apple or Google, defeating protections those companies build for their users.

The range is part of the FBI’s broader Huntsville campus, which has become a hub for the agency’s technical and cyber operations. By simulating an entire community rather than a single server room, the FBI is training agents to understand the cascading effects of cyberattacks, how a breach at a power company affects the hospital down the street, and how a ransomware demand creates pressure that extends far beyond the keyboard.

The timing of the reveal is deliberate. AI is making vulnerability discovery cheaper and faster, with autonomous agents finding zero-days in hours for under $1,000. At the same time, state-backed hacking groups are industrialising their operations. The FBI’s answer is to train investigators in the most realistic conditions it can build, one fake town at a time.