The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has deployed a unique 2,000-square-meter Kinetic Cyber Range at its base in Huntsville, Alabama. The facility is built in the form of a detailed American town, where law enforcement officers learn to simulate and investigate real-life cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has deployed a unique 2,000-square-meter Kinetic Cyber Range at its base in Huntsville, Alabama. The facility is built in the form of a detailed American town, where law enforcement officers learn to simulate and investigate real-life cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.
TechCrunch reports on the launch and features of this closed complex. The main goal of the project is to take the training of specialists beyond the boundaries of classic lecture halls and provide them with the opportunity to work with modern consumer and corporate technologies, which are most often targeted by hackers.
The Kinetic Cyber Range opened in early 2025. It includes fully equipped residential buildings, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital, and even an energy company office, complete with working roads and traffic lights. All of the facilities are equipped with working devices and systems that function exactly as they do in real life. The site is completely isolated from the external network, making it impossible for simulated cyberattacks to reach outside the complex.
An important part of the cyber polygon is its own data center, which has over 200 physical servers running Windows and Linux operating systems. This allows you to recreate an authentic corporate environment that agents typically encounter during searches or when responding to IT system breaches.
«It’s cold, cramped, noisy, dark, it’s horrible,» describes the atmosphere of the workspace, said Dave Beachboard, the landfill’s program manager.
This realism allows the FBI to simulate complex ransomware attack scenarios, putting investigators under a time pressure to make critical decisions, such as responding to a life-support shutdown in a simulated hospital.
The training ground also studies digital forensics techniques and how to bypass security measures on encrypted devices. The use of such tools remains controversial because they exploit vulnerabilities that are not disclosed to developers like Apple or Google in advance.
Since the launch of the Kinetic Cyber Range, more than 1,400 FBI professionals and partners from other federal and local US agencies have been trained there. The need for such a center is also confirmed by the financial scale of cybercrime. According to the FBI’s annual report on cybercrime for 2025, losses from hacker activities in the US reached a record $20.9 billion, which is 26% more than the year before, and ransomware remains the main threat to infrastructure.
Recall that Ukraine is consistently at the epicenter of cyberattacks and is one of the key targets for attackers in Eastern Europe amid growing geopolitical instability in early 2026. This is stated in the first Cyber Pulse report from Mastercard, dedicated to studying the cyber threat landscape in the EEMEA region (Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa).
