Page 52 - Cyber Warnings

All of this trageting is designed to use the essential weakness of electronics: heat. I told a Grace
Hopper technician one time (Sam Paul of UNIVAC) that Eckert and Mauchley (ENIAC) should
not have had hundreds of light bulbs signaling the functioning of valves (vacuum tubes) but
rather--- to create less heat---light up only when a tube fails.

Seymour Cray (the famous designer of supercomputing machines) sank electronics in oil to
lower heat and felt a continuous flow of current would save more vacuum tubes than constant
shutting off and turning on the things, stressing them.

And the NSA had to rely on GCHQ when air-conditioning failed for more than two days to cool
their supercomputers at Ft. Meade (Jan.24, 2000). No pun intended, but in the first few seconds
of nation-state cyber war things will really heat up! And fail. Unable to stock up on replacements
and unable to engage in replacing parts quickly enough, the counter-strike capability goes
down.

And now there is research into the dopant of the transistor in terms of changing the polarity so
that random number generation effectively fails---see Infosec Inst. (Oct 13, 2015). This, like
BIOS, is prepatory work for war. Even the engineering of the Internet itself: backbones,
gateways, ICANN can be targeted.

But the strategy for all of these possible targets is to minimize the counter-strike. Once all of the
above weapons are in place and are operating in the first few seconds of cyber war, priorities
other than preventing a counter-strike can be pursued—such as the power grids, water utilities,
banking, local governments.

Even so, military insitutions and Intelligence agencies of the adversary will be independent of
the necessity of a power grid.

Two dangerous thoughts arise: citizen cyber gangs (like Fancy Bear) enable attacks that invite
little or no retaliation but we may reach a point where their governments ARE
attacked…second, and it can’t be discussed here, there remains the danger that if any nation-
state is losing a cyberwar, it may force the situation to escalate. Nuclear war.

About the Author

Geoffrey Nicoletti is an independent research analyst. He is a former
member of both the IEEE and NCMF; he is active with ICTTF. His work on
the Y2K problem brought recognition from Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah; he
produced a paper for Booz Allan Hamilton days before Mr. Snowden left
the United States. Geoffrey can be reached at @Sigsaly1

52 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2017 Edition
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