{"id":236931,"date":"2026-06-25T04:48:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T08:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/cybersecurity-gets-real-at-fbi-kinetic-cyber-range\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T06:35:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T10:35:23","slug":"cybersecurity-gets-real-at-fbi-kinetic-cyber-range","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/cybersecurity-gets-real-at-fbi-kinetic-cyber-range\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity Gets Real at FBI Kinetic Cyber Range"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cybersecurity Gets Real at FBI Kinetic Cyber Range<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/securityboulevard.com\/2026\/06\/cybersecurity-gets-real-at-fbi-kinetic-cyber-range\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-25 04:48:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: securityboulevard.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
\n\t\t\tThe FBI has changed its training tactics over the years with a tacit acknowledgment that hands-on experience is almost always the best way to learn. That\u2019s not to say classroom instruction should go the way of the dodo bird, but at the bureau\u2019s 22,000-square-foot Kinetic Cyber Range in Huntsville, Alabama, eager future agents get to learn \u201cin the field.\u201dLocated on the FBI\u2019s North Campus at Redstone Arsenal, the training environment mirrors a real town, complete with businesses, infrastructure, and homes. No one lives or works there; just students crawling its streets solving and thwarting cyberattacks before being unleashed into the real world as FBI agents.\u201cThe systems that we have running in these facilities are just as real as the facade on the outside,\u201d Dave Beachboard, manager of the Kinetic Cyber Range, said in a story posted on the FBI\u2019s website. \u201cWhen they start diving into the network, they\u2019re going to see Active Directory, email, firewalls\u2014everything that\u2019s typical of that venue.\u201dTrey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer at Bugcrowd, says what stands out \u201cis the recognition that you can\u2019t simulate cyber-physical attacks in a sandbox, you need actual hardware, actual control systems, actual consequences.\u201dThat\u2019s something Ford has \u201cdreamed of seeing a Black Hat for years \u2013 a live-fire cyber range.\u201d Standing up the range is more than live targets, he says, \u201cit\u2019s an operational playground where buyers, vendors and analysts can test and reproduce real-world conditions to understand what works, and how capabilities fail.\u201dBy providing a realistic environment to train against threats targeting critical infrastructure, Matthew Hartman, chief strategy officer at Merlin Group, says \u201cthe Bureau is helping build the operational readiness needed to defend both IT and OT environments.\u201dThe industry should take note\u2014it\u2019s \u201canother signal that cybersecurity and critical infrastructure resilience will remain national priorities for years to come,\u201d he says.The FBI article describes a scenario in which students assess a home loaded with devices connected to the internet and must decide which items to seize; in another scenario, they removed a car\u2019s electronic control unit.\u00a0The range also has \u201ca data center that has over 200 servers running in it,\u201d Beachboard is cited as saying. \u201cSome are running Windows, some are running Linux. So, a student gets to encounter what it\u2019s like working in a data center.\u201dStanding out at the facility \u201cis the focus on OT and IoT systems, which are the most vulnerable and increasingly the target of ransomware attacks,\u201d says John Gallagher, vice president at Viakoo.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cBeing able to simulate ransomware attacks within a city, school, or hospital setting provides a valuable real-world training opportunity at a time when many organizations are shifting their focus to OT security,\u201d he says.\u00a0Gallagher points to the complex environment the FBI has created, noting it \u201cis ideal for testing and analyzing the means of lateral movement\u201d and explaining that \u201cknowing how malware deployed in an IP security camera ends up taking down critical infrastructure is one of the key learnings that can come from this.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With cybercrime costs on the rise, Gallagher says, \u201cif this facility can help to bring down that cost through effective prevention and remediation methods by even a small fraction, it will deliver significant ROI.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The Kinetic Cyber Range mimics what private industry has been doing for years\u2014ongoing training to prevent cyberattacks. \u201cThis is bringing that same concept to the agents and law enforcement officers who need better training on how to respond to cyber incidents,\u201d says Gallagher, and \u201ccan train cyber defenders to quickly know what to do and how to do it.\u201dThe range reflects a reemerging trend. \u201cAttacks on critical infrastructure no longer originate at a network port. They originate at a door, a console, a server-room walk-in, a contractor with credentials they should not have, or a tailgater into a control room from which the rest of the network is reachable,\u201d says Jody Russell, senior solutions engineer at Ambient.ai.\u00a0\u201cThe IT-OT air gap is effectively gone, and the layer of the perimeter where physical presence becomes digital access is the layer that has received the least investment from the cyber stack,\u201d says Gallagher.Rather than being static, the Range also helps the FBI make changes as they go. \u201cIf we see gaps in training, we will adjust,\u201d Beachboard was cited as saying, \u201cmaking sure that students are encountering the latest software, the latest Internet of Things, the latest drones, the latest vehicle forensics\u2014all of that to keep us cutting edge.\u201d
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cybersecurity Gets Real at FBI Kinetic Cyber Range https:\/\/securityboulevard.com\/2026\/06\/cybersecurity-gets-real-at-fbi-kinetic-cyber-range\/ Publish Date: 2026-06-25 04:48:00 Source Domain:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/securityboulevard.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Untitled-design-86.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,24,32],"class_list":["post-236931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-cybersecurity","tag-malware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236931"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236933,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236931\/revisions\/236933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}