FBI Unveils Kinetic Cyber Range Replica Town in Huntsville, Alabama for Cyberattack Training

The FBI has unveiled the Kinetic Cyber Range, a 22,000-square-foot replica small town on its Huntsville, Alabama campus designed to simulate realistic cyberattacks on homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure.

“While Hollywood has fake cities for filming movies, the FBI apparently has one for getting hacked”

Digital Trends

Digital Trends says the facility is built so investigators can practice responding to simulated ransomware attacks and tracing digital footprints across interconnected systems in a controlled environment.

Digital Trends

TechCrunch reports the range opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company, complete with roads and traffic lights.

The KuCoin account adds that the town’s buildings are connected to operational devices and systems and that it includes a data center equipped with over 200 physical servers running both Windows and Linux systems.

According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report as cited by TechCrunch, U.S. cybercrime losses reached a record $20.9 billion, a 26% jump over the prior year, with ransomware ranked the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.

TechCrunch describes how the Kinetic Cyber Range wires each part of the town 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.

The facility also supports digital forensics training, and TechCrunch says investigators use it to “crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data from devices.”

KuCoin

In the FBI’s write-up, Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, tells TechCrunch, “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable,” about the training environment.

KuCoin similarly says the setup more closely resembles environments investigators encounter during corporate breaches or when executing search warrants, and it notes that exercises are confined to a closed premises.

Mezha.net adds that the town can model ransomware attacks and their consequences, including pressure-driven decisions when responding to incidents that could harm people, such as outages of hospital systems.

KuCoin reports that since the facility opened, it has trained over 1,400 participants, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies, using the replica town to practice incident response and digital forensics.

“Inside a full scale mock town agents confront ransomware scenarios and digital forensics challenges”

mezha.net

Digital Trends frames the Kinetic Cyber Range as a way to replace classroom theory with hands-on scenarios where mistakes can be made safely before agents face similar incidents in the real world.

Mezha.net says the range’s digital forensics training involves tools used to bypass protections on encrypted devices to extract data for investigations, and it notes that this triggers discussions about exploiting vulnerabilities not disclosed to device manufacturers.

KuCoin adds that forensic tools can be controversial because some rely on security vulnerabilities not disclosed to device manufacturers to bypass protections set by companies like Apple and Google.

With ransomware identified as the top persistent threat to critical infrastructure in the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report cited by TechCrunch, the Kinetic Cyber Range’s focus on simulating cascading impacts—such as hospital system outages—puts public-safety scenarios at the center of the training.