The FBI has opened up a detailed look at its Kinetic Cyber Range, a 22,000-square-foot replica town in Huntsville, Alabama, built to train investigators on cyberattacks that spill into hospitals, power systems, vehicles, data centers, and ordinary connected devices.
The facility, described in a June 9 FBI story, sits on the bureau’s Redstone Arsenal campus and has been operating since February 2025. It has already trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other agencies. The point is not just to teach software tools. It is to put investigators in something closer to the conditions they will face when a ransomware case, search warrant, intrusion investigation, or digital-forensics problem is unfolding under pressure.
That makes the range more than a striking law-enforcement prop. It is a signal that cyber response is becoming physical, operational, and multidisciplinary. The FBI is training students inside a wired environment with houses, hotel rooms, a gas station, a market, a power company, a hospital, vehicle bays, and a working data-center environment. Each setting is designed to behave like the real systems investigators encounter outside a classroom.
Why a fake town matters
Traditional cyber training can make incident response look cleaner than it is. A student receives a device image, a log set, or a prepared scenario, then works through the technical problem at a desk. Real investigations rarely arrive that neatly. A hospital may be losing access to systems. A business may have lawyers, executives, and system administrators in the room. A search team may need to decide which devices matter and which can be left behind. A vehicle may contain evidence in an electronic control unit rather than a laptop.
The Kinetic Cyber Range is built around that messiness. The FBI says students practice moving through homes filled with connected devices, serving search warrants at businesses, working with administrators to reach corporate-network data, extracting vehicle electronics, and operating in a data center with more than 200 servers running Windows and Linux. Those details matter because they place cyber evidence in the same real-world environments where organizations actually make mistakes during incidents: under time pressure, with incomplete information, and with people watching.
The facility also brings together skills that are often separated on paper. The FBI’s Operational Technology Division, which focuses on digital forensics, trains alongside the Cyber Division, which investigates computer intrusions. In practice, a modern cyber case can need both: forensic handling of devices and a network-level understanding of how an intrusion began, moved, and affected systems across locations.
Ransomware is the clearest test case
The most useful example is the range’s simulated hospital ransomware scenario. According to the FBI, students face alarms and role players responding as if patient care is at risk. That is the right kind of stressor. Ransomware response is no longer just a question of decryptors, backups, or endpoint telemetry. It is a leadership problem, a legal problem, a public-safety problem, and a communications problem at the same time.
That aligns with the broader threat picture. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report says IC3 received more than 1 million complaints last year, with reported losses nearing $21 billion. The report also highlighted AI-related complaints for the first time, covering 22,364 complaints and nearly $893 million in losses. Those figures are not a direct measure of ransomware’s full operational damage, but they show why law enforcement and defenders are trying to rehearse incidents before they become active crises.
For companies and public agencies, the lesson is plain: tabletop exercises are useful, but they are not enough on their own. Security teams need to practice who talks to whom, who has authority to shut down systems, who can approve evidence collection, how legal and communications teams are briefed, and what happens when the most important system in the room is not a server but a hospital workflow, a vehicle, a badge reader, or a payment terminal.
The technical lesson is about environments, not tools
One reason the Kinetic Cyber Range is notable is that it trains against environments rather than isolated artifacts. A data center with Windows and Linux servers teaches different judgment than a single disk image. A home full of connected devices forces investigators to sort signal from clutter. A corporate network requires coordination with administrators who may be worried about downtime, customer data, privilege exposure, or business disruption.
That is also how enterprise defenders should think about incident readiness. A good response plan does not only list security products. It maps identity systems, backups, cloud accounts, logging retention, endpoint coverage, privileged access, vendor dependencies, and business-critical workflows. It also identifies where evidence could be lost if teams move too quickly, and where operational harm could grow if they move too slowly.
The FBI’s vehicle-forensics example is a reminder that digital evidence is spreading into ordinary objects. Cars, drones, access-control systems, medical devices, cameras, and industrial equipment can all become part of an investigation. For security leaders, that means asset inventories and incident playbooks need to account for more than laptops, servers, and cloud consoles. The edge of the network is increasingly where facts live.
What defenders can borrow from the model
Most organizations are not going to build a replica town, but they can copy the operating principle. Incident-response training should include realistic people, systems, and constraints. A ransomware drill should test business leadership and legal escalation, not only backup restoration. A phishing investigation should include help-desk triage, identity logs, mailbox rules, endpoint evidence, and employee communications. A cloud compromise exercise should include billing, secrets, service accounts, and deployment pipelines.
The strongest exercises also force decisions before every fact is known. Who can preserve logs? Who contacts law enforcement? Who decides whether to isolate a segment? What systems must keep running? Which outside vendors can be reached after hours? Which backup copies are clean enough to trust? These are not questions to answer for the first time during an incident.
The FBI’s fake town is visually memorable, but its real message is more practical. Cyber incidents now move through physical places, business processes, connected devices, and human pressure. Teams that only rehearse the technical layer will be underprepared for the rest of the event.
For law enforcement, the Kinetic Cyber Range gives investigators a place to make mistakes before a real case. For companies, the equivalent is a response program that treats training as an operational rehearsal rather than a compliance meeting. The more realistic the exercise, the less surprising the actual incident becomes.
