The Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally revealed the 22,000 square-foot replica town it built on its Huntsville, Alabama campus, presumably because the Sims wasn't offering enough cybercrime simulation DLC. Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber Range, the facility opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company - complete with roads and traffic lights - all designed to mimic a real U.S. community. Because nothing says "realistic training" like a gas station that never runs out of gas and a courthouse where everyone's actually paying attention.
The goal is to teach investigators in a secure environment beyond the classroom by getting hands-on with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies - many of which, surprise surprise, are frequently targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training into context: the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, drawing on more than one million complaints, logged a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses - a 26% jump over the prior year - with ransomware ranked as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure. So yes, it's less "practice makes perfect" and more "practice makes slightly less catastrophic."
Since opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies. Each part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business, while preventing any simulated attacks from spilling out of the facility. So no, you can't accidentally take down the real power grid while pretending to take down a fake one.
The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers - some running Windows, some Linux - reflecting the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, describes the data center in terms that make it sound like a haunted house for IT professionals: "They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable." So basically, it's exactly like a real data center, minus the existential dread of actual ransomware.
The replica town also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions that investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people, such as hospital systems going dark. Because nothing sharpens the mind like deciding whether to pay the ransom or let the fake town's fake hospital go offline.
The Kinetic Cyber Range also helps train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data - often for building a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial, as they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to the device maker (such as Apple or Google) to defeat the protections those companies build in for their users. So the FBI builds a fake town to practice hacking fake devices, using methods that would make real tech companies very unhappy if they knew about them. It's all very meta.