Von Neumann’s War

Richard had searched for a month to find the most secluded and deep underground Internet service providers in the area that ran close to the river that wound through the mountains. He found one switching hub from the phone network at the edge of the town just below the mountain. He found a server that was operated from a small service provider a few miles up river on the other side of the mountain. He found two different cable/Internet companies that had brought high speed wireless up the mountain along with digital cable. One connection he hacked into ran beneath a power line that ran across the mountain ridge on the other side of the valley. Two ran from Park Ranger stations at either end of the river on each side of the mountain. His final and perhaps most robust connection was to an abandoned SCADA network running the old railroad system that wound through the mountains. Richard expected it to be the most likely system to survive.

SCADA, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, weren’t actually full control systems or Internet connections. Instead SCADA systems were typically designed for use on the supervisory level. Fortunately, most supervisors would rather use Internet connectivity and simple browsers to supervise such systems. It was just easier for them.

Richard knew that the good thing about SCADA control systems was that they were basically all software that had been overlaid on top of a networked hardware system. SCADA was a fairly common and commercial approach that used COTS devices that could be interfaced and programmed easily. Their robustness and versatility had made them quite popular as the programmable logic control system of choice since early 2000. Not only were they used for railroads and factories, SCADA systems were ideally suited for any large manufacturing facility that had thousands of input/output interface requirements, such as car manufacturing plants, nuclear plants, power generation and transfer plants, and even some airport systems.

Unfortunately, the only one that came near the Appalachian Mountain chain that Richard could find was the railroad system. It was easy enough to hack into since there was little need for network security from bears and raccoons. Most of the older SCADA systems ran on DOS, VMS and UNIX; this one used UNIX. Richard spoke UNIX just fine. So he hacked in and got connected and then only had to drag a line back to the river, then through an access shaft to the mine. The portion running up to the access shaft was pure optical cable, so the bots should leave it alone.

Thus Richard had eight different routes to gain Internet connectivity. Once he had identified his closest Internet service provider locations, he either set up accounts or hacked into the cables. Mostly he hacked into the systems by splitting the cables at junction boxes. Where he could get line of sight he set up lasercom relay systems to the river and then he dropped cable downriver to the mine. This all sounded simple, but it actually involved several months of very tedious and sometimes clandestine work. He also found that he had to run power cables up to the edge of the river to power the lasercom systems. Fortunately, he only ended up using three different lasercom routes and was able to drop cable all the way from the other six connections.

Bandwidth was his big problem. He knew the long drops would only supply low bandwidth connections. He hoped to mitigate that with a couple of different approaches. The first was to multiplex the eight different connections, thus effectively increasing his bandwidth by sending IP packets out sequentially on dynamic IP addresses. This would help some.

The other way he planned to increase his bandwidth was by placing a big amplifier at each end of the connections. Under normal circumstances the companies would have eventually found the hacks, but nothing about nowadays was normal. Richard was planning on the companies basically dropping out of customer service and such matters altogether. So looking for hacks would be low on their lists of things to do. And if they did find them all, which he doubted, he would fall back on bursting transmissions through the amateur radio repeater networks. But there was still something nagging him about that.