FBI Opens Full-Scale Cyber Range With Simulated Town in Alabama

The FBI has constructed a 22,000-square-foot simulated town in Huntsville, Alabama, designed specifically for training personnel to respond to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. The facility, which opened in 2025, represents a physical approach to understanding digital threats.

The Kinetic Cyber Range includes a convenience store, gas station, hospital, and fully furnished residential homes — all connected with the same networked systems found in actual communities. At the center sits a data center housing more than 200 servers that can be deliberately compromised, infected with malware, and analyzed without risk to external networks.

Training for real-world digital threats

The facility operates as an isolated environment where all systems remain disconnected from the outside world, preventing any malicious code from escaping containment. This design allows FBI personnel and researchers to conduct aggressive penetration testing and study how cyberattacks propagate through interconnected systems.

Training scenarios cover forensic investigations across multiple domains: car entertainment systems, hospital computer networks, corporate security infrastructure, power grid vulnerabilities, and home network propagation patterns. The range enables students to observe cascading effects of digital attacks in a controlled setting that mirrors real-world complexity.

Why it matters

As critical infrastructure becomes increasingly networked — from healthcare systems to power grids — the attack surface for adversaries expands dramatically. Traditional classroom training cannot replicate the interconnected nature of modern cyber threats. By building a physical town where digital and physical systems intersect, the FBI can better prepare for scenarios where cyberattacks have kinetic consequences, such as hospital system failures or power grid disruptions. The facility also provides a research environment for understanding how attacks spread across different types of infrastructure without risking actual public systems.

The FBI released video footage of the facility this week, providing the first public look inside the training environment. The concept draws parallels to Hogan's Alley, the FBI's long-standing physical training town used for traditional law enforcement scenarios, but adapted for the digital threat landscape.

The Verge first reported details of the Kinetic Cyber Range and its capabilities.