While Hollywood has fake cities for filming movies, the FBI apparently has one for getting hacked. The agency has pulled back the curtain on its Kinetic Cyber Range, a 22,000-square-foot replica small town hidden inside its Huntsville, Alabama campus. But instead of training officers for shootouts or hostage rescues, the facility is designed to simulate realistic cyberattacks on homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure so investigators can practice responding to them in a controlled environment.
The FBI built an entire town just to simulate cybercrime
The indoor complex includes buildings such as homes, a hotel, a gas station, a courthouse, and even a fully functional data center packed with around 200 servers. Each location is wired with operating systems, connected devices, and live networks to mirror the kinds of digital environments agents encounter during real investigations.
According to the FBI, trainees can investigate simulated ransomware attacks, recover evidence from hacked vehicles, and trace digital footprints across multiple interconnected systems. Since opening last year, the facility has reportedly trained more than 1,400 FBI personnel and members of other government agencies. The goal is simple: replace classroom theory with realistic, hands-on scenarios where mistakes can be made safely before agents face similar incidents in the real world.
Cybercrime has become too real to train with PowerPoint slides
The idea might sound unusual, but it reflects how modern cyberattacks increasingly spill into the physical world. Ransomware can shut down hospitals, compromised industrial systems can disrupt utilities, and hacked vehicles or IoT devices often require investigators to understand both hardware and software simultaneously.
In many ways, the Kinetic Cyber Range is the cyber equivalent of the FBI’s famous Hogan’s Alley training town in Quantico, except the bullets have been replaced by malware and forensic tools. As digital attacks continue targeting everything from power grids to city infrastructure, having an entire fake town where agents can safely break and rebuild systems before responding to the real thing suddenly feels less like science fiction and more like a necessity.
