The Federal Bureau of Investigation has lifted the curtain on a 22,000-square-foot replica city it built on its Huntsville, Alabama, campus to train law enforcement to simulate and investigate real-world cyberattacks.
The goal is to teach investigators in a safe environment outside the classroom by practicing the latest consumer and enterprise technologies that are often targets for malicious hackers. Numbers put education in context. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than 1 million complaints, puts U.S. cybercrime losses at a record $20.9 billion, up 26% from the previous year, and ranks ransomware as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.
The FBI’s small, purpose-built village, called Kinetic Cyber Range, opened in February 2025 and is designed to mimic a real American community, complete with fully furnished homes, a hotel, gas station, grocery store, courthouse, hospital, and power company, complete with roads and traffic lights. Since opening, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI employees and partners from other federal and local agencies, according to the agency.
Each part of the city is connected by devices and systems that operate just as they would in a real community or business, preventing simulated attacks from escaping the facility.
The scope also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers (some running Windows, some running Linux) that reflect the corporate environment investigators might encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. “They are cold, cramped, noisy, dark and miserable,” explains Dave Beachboard, training site program manager, in an FBI article about the training conditions.
Clone Cities also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the urgent decisions investigators must make when responding to incidents that could harm people, such as ransomware attacks and hospital systems going dark.
Kinetic Cyber Range also helps train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to penetrate the cybersecurity defenses of modern encrypted devices and extract data from them, often for the purpose of establishing criminal investigations. The tools used to do this are controversial, as they exploit vulnerabilities that are not disclosed to device manufacturers such as Apple or Google, defeating the protections those companies have built for their users.
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