Santa’s Campaign of Holiday Terror

A couple years ago I wrote a short piece detailing efforts to defeat Santa’s annual campaign of aerial incursion. With two years of air campaign under our belt, it’s time to revisit this long-standing security problem:

The war against Santa is a multi-domain conflict. In recent years defenders have made huge leaps in “left of launch” efforts to defeat Santa even before his sleigh takes to the air. It is well-understood that the Jolly Old Elf enjoys the capabilities of a vast surveillance network, allowing his army of analysts to distinguish between the “naughty,” and the “nice.”  Disrupting and corrupting this network has increasingly become the purview of cyber-warfighters around the world.

Passive, defensive countermeasures help to reduce the extent of data that Santa can access during a given holiday period. Active counter-measures help to corrupt the data that feeds the analytical systems at the North Pole, reducing Santa’s confidence in his targeting systems. General attacks across the network help to degrade the North Pole’s “information economy,” reducing overall organizational effectiveness. Of course, the battle is not one-sided; Santa’s capacity for identifying “black hat” and “white hat” hackers and appropriately determining “rewards” for each continues to baffle and terrify the cyber-community. 

Some other links:

• Ukrainian air defense strategy
• Air defense technology and the shape of warfighting in Ukraine.
• Next generation fighters and drones from Saab…
• Stealth and Scale: Quality and Quantity in strike systems.