The FBI's Kinetic Cyber training range in Huntsville, AL.

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The Kinetic Cyber Range—a 22,000-square-foot training environment operated by the Bureau's Operational Technology Division—resembles a small town built for investigations. There are houses and hotel rooms, a power company, a hospital, and a gas station. Each space is wired with functioning systems, networks, and devices designed to behave as they would in the real world.

Since opening in February 2025, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other agencies.

But the point isn't just scale. It's realism.





"The systems that we have running in these facilities are just as real as the facade on the outside," Beachboard said. "When they start diving into the network, they’re going to see Active Directory, email, firewalls—everything that's typical of that venue."

In one scenario, students move through a home filled with internet-connected devices and decide what to seize and what to leave behind. In another, they serve a search warrant at a business and work with system administrators to access data buried inside a corporate network.

Elsewhere, inside a data center, the training becomes more physical.

"I have a data center that has over 200 servers running in it," Beachboard said. "Some are running Windows, some are running Linux. So, a student gets to encounter what it's like working in a data center."

The conditions are deliberate.

"They're cold, they're cramped, they're noisy, they're dark, they're miserable," he said. "Again, recreating what it's like working in a data center."

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