Could a Hacker Launch a Nuke?
This article is available in video format: https://youtu.be/BsFCjknmHPU
The total number of known nuclear warheads worldwide was 12705 in January 2022. That’s a lot of explosives. In terms of destruction it is much more worrying with a single bomb being able to destroy 80 square miles, all of the warheads combined would be able to collectively impact over 1 million square miles. So how do countries protect these weapons? And could a hacker launch them?
Nuclear weapons facilities are some of the most secure and surely this means they are un-hackable right? Wrong!
In fact, there have been multiple cases that prove the contrary, for example in 2010 Iran’s nuclear program was devastated by a virus named Stuxnet. Stuxnet is thought to have been created as cyberwarfare by a combination of the US and Israel.
The virus worked by targeting windows networks and computer systems by continuously replicating itself. It is a very complex malware and has abilities beyond what had been seen previously including faking sensors to make a system appear to be fine and even being able to physically destroy some devices.
Nuclear weapons sites are often air-gapped meaning a hacker would be unable to access them remotely, so this begs the question: how did it infect Iran’s nuclear program?
The most likely way is being transmitted through a USB, allowing the virus to physically be downloaded onto the target system. To get the USB the market was allegedly flooded with infected USBs, which in turn, increases the chance of a successful attack. Although we now know it’s possible to hack nuclear sites, it doesn’t mean a hacker could launch a nuke.
If we take the United States for example, which owns around 4000 nuclear warheads only one person has the ability to launch a nuke… the president. That fact becomes even scarier when you find out that no one else has the ability to dispute the president's decision. It is an incredibly fragile system that allows for 8 minutes to make a decision on whether to start a nuclear war or not.
The process to launch a nuke follows this simple process:
First, the US nuclear command and control system detects incoming missiles.
Second, the Department of Defense takes approximately 1 minute to brief the president on what is occurring
Thirdly the president is given 7 minutes to talk to their advisors and come up with a final decision.
And lastly, the nuclear war starts.
To confirm the attack the president must do it and also has a secret code that allows operators to confirm their identity, this makes it difficult for a hacker to launch a nuke as they’d have to know this code and also perhaps be the president. This makes it difficult, but is there still another way they could do it?
Well possibly, the highly intense situation around the decision to launch a nuke could cause a wrong decision to be made. Social engineering would be the most likely path a hacker would take. Manipulating the detection systems into thinking a nuke had been launched or pretending to be another political leader could result in a nuke being launched.
And going about this would be no easy task, there has been a surprising amount of mistakes detecting missiles. A total of 22 known narrow misses have almost resulted in WW3. One of these narrow misses even includes a plane accidentally dropping a nuclear bomb and causing some chickens to be vaporized. Another situation that became very close to a nuclear war was on the 25th of January 1995 when the then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin became the first world leader to activate a nuclear briefcase.
After a satellite launched from Norway was mistaken for a missile. This is something a hacker could potentially replicate but would also require them to physically launch something which seems somewhat unrealistic. A more likely scenario would be a denial of service attack, this is where a service is brought offline by overloading it with data, which would mean that the government wouldn’t have the ability to prevent them from launching.
And a book looking into the nuclear arms race included with an expert saying there is a growing concern about hackers, viruses, or AI bots starting a nuclear war. The same expert was quoted “we believe that the change of false alarms has gone up with the increased danger of cyber attacks” further solidifying this theory.
In conclusion, this video points out how ridiculous the current system is and how few people have such control over many others. There is also only one definite way to prevent a nuclear cyber-attack, which is to not have them in the first place.
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