FBI Builds 22,000-Square-Foot Replica Town to Train Cyberattack Investigators

The FBI’s Kinetic Cyber Range is a 22,000-square-foot replica town at the Huntsville, Alabama campus designed for hands-on cyber defense training. Opened in February 2025, it has since trained more than 1,400 participants, including FBI staff and partners from other agencies. The town replicates a full community, with furnished homes, a hotel, gas station, grocery, courthouse, hospital, power company, and a data center running 200+ physical servers on Windows and Linux. Trainees practice breaking in, defending, and investigating incidents with built-in containment, enabling ransomware drills and digital forensics in a controlled setting that mirrors real-world cascading effects.