The FBI constructed a simulated town to prepare agents for cyberattacks. This town includes a hospital, an electricity provider, and 200 servers.

      **Summary:** The FBI has created a 22,000 sq ft replica town at its Huntsville, Alabama campus to train agents on live cyberattacks. This facility includes a hospital, residences, and 200 servers, and has trained over 1,400 individuals since its launch in February 2025.

      The FBI has announced a 22,000-square-foot replica town located on its Huntsville, Alabama campus, designed to prepare law enforcement for simulating and investigating actual cyberattacks. The Kinetic Cyber Range, which opened in February 2025, has provided training for more than 1,400 students, including agents from the FBI and representatives from various federal and local agencies.

      The facility is equipped with fully furnished homes, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company. It includes roads and traffic signals. Each building is outfitted with functional devices and systems that simulate those found in a typical US community while ensuring that simulated attacks do not leave the premises.

      The range has a data center housing over 200 physical servers, with some operating on Windows and others on Linux, which reflect the environments that investigators encounter during breach responses and search operations. Dave Beachboard, the program manager for the range, described the conditions investigators need to prepare for as “cold, cramped, noisy, dark, and miserable.”

      This training is crucial, especially as the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded a historic $20.9 billion in cybercrime losses in the US, marking a 26% increase from the previous year. Ransomware has been identified as the primary ongoing threat to critical infrastructure. The Kinetic Cyber Range allows agents to practice responding to ransomware attacks, such as when a hospital's systems go offline, requiring decisions that prioritize patient safety alongside technical ones.

      Additionally, the facility instructs investigators in digital forensics, focusing on the technique of accessing encrypted devices to obtain data for investigations. The methods employed are contentious, as they rely on vulnerabilities that remain undisclosed to companies like Apple or Google, circumventing the protections those firms establish for users.

      This facility is part of a larger complex at the FBI's Huntsville campus, which has become the agency’s center for technical and cyber operations. By creating a full community environment rather than a single server room, the FBI aims to train agents to recognize the ripple effects of cyberattacks, such as how a breach at a power company could impact a nearby hospital and the wider pressures created by a ransomware demand.

      The timing of this announcement is intentional, as advancements in AI have made vulnerability discovery more efficient and affordable, enabling autonomous agents to identify zero-day vulnerabilities within hours for less than $1,000. Concurrently, state-sponsored hacking groups are modernizing their methods. In response, the FBI aims to train investigators under the most realistic conditions possible, building one simulated town at a time.