The FBI has opened a Cyber Range in Huntsville, Alabama, designed to simulate real-world cyberattacks on critical infrastructure — and it looks more like a miniature city than a server room.
According to The Verge, the facility includes a fake power company and a fake data center, allowing trainees to experience scenarios like artificially jacked-up electricity prices triggered by a compromised grid. The range is meant to recreate the kind of cascading failures that happen when digital systems controlling physical infrastructure get hit.
The FBI's inspiration, per The Verge, is Hogan's Alley — the Bureau's famous fake town in Quantico used for decades to train agents in physical law enforcement scenarios like hostage situations and bank robberies. The Huntsville range is the cyber equivalent: a controlled environment where the "streets" are network connections and the "buildings" are simulated industrial systems.
The facility opened last year and is based in Huntsville, a city already home to a dense concentration of defense and aerospace contractors, making it a natural hub for this kind of work.
It matters because cyberattacks on power grids, water treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical — training environments like this give investigators and defenders a place to practice responding before a real attack forces them to improvise.