SCP-5124 — SCP-5124 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-5124 Euclid ~ medium confidence

SCP-5124

Expected annual

$9.7M

One-time setup

$33.5M

Annual recurring

$8.6M

Personnel

Estimated one-time setup costs are dominated by an emergency incident seed fund and facility/research buildout (~$33.45M one-time); steady-state operations run at roughly $8.576M/year driven by staff wages, continuous compute/storage, legal/PR/takedown retainers, and ongoing reserve replenishment.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $33.5M

Emergency Reserve Seed $25.5M

[#17] Seed contingency fund for large-scale outbreak response (one-time capital reserve).

Long Term Research Seed $2.6M

[#25] One-time seed funding for long-term eradication/permanent neutralization research programs.

Facilities $1.9M

[#4, #14, #15] Secure analysis environment (air-gapped lab), interrogation/detention facility setup, and chain-of-evidence vault setup costs combined.

Detection Webcrawler $1.2M

[#1] Design/build/deploy Beta-17 "Mousetrap" webcrawler (development & integration).

Ml Model R And D $850K

[#2] One-time R&D and initial training costs for .AIC-5124 (model development, training dataset acquisition).

Equipment $670K

[#5, #7, #19, #20] Forensic toolkits & licenses (hardware portion), industrial device-destruction equipment/facility upgrades, backup generator/UPS hardware, and secure communications hardware.

Power Backup Setup $275K

[#19] One-time purchase/installation of backup generators and UPS systems for data-center redundancy.

Device Destruction Setup $200K

[#7] Industrial shredder/incineration capability and facility upgrade for on-site device destruction.

Secure Communications Setup $110K

[#20] One-time setup of encrypted communications systems, secure phones, and OPSEC tooling.

Honeypot Setup $105K

[#11] One-time setup of multiple decoy low-traffic sites / controlled webspace.

Seizure And Transport Setup $28K

[#6] SOP development, vehicles, tamper-evident containers, Faraday bags, PPE and field kits (initial purchase).

Initial Research And Lab Setup $0

[]

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $8.6M/yr

Staff Wages $2.7M/yr

[#8, #9, #13] Salaries/benefits for incident response teams (MTF/cyber ops), core cybersecurity staff (analysts/SREs/ML engineers), and a small medical team.

Emergency Reserve Replenishment $1.0M/yr

[#17] Annual replenishment allocation to maintain contingency reserve after emergencies.

Cover Story And Legal $825K/yr

[#10, #12] Retainers and takedown/cover-story/PR operations plus reimbursements and emergency takedown fees.

Insurance And Litigation $525K/yr

[#24] Insurance premiums, legal defense retainers, and litigation funds for exposures or claims.

Long Term Research And Development Per Year $500K/yr

[#25] Ongoing research budget for eradication/permanent neutralization work.

Medical Treatment Costs $425K/yr

[#13] Per-person amnestic treatments and aftercare (assumes ~10 treatments/year at midpoint).

Compute And Storage $330K/yr

[#3] Continuous compute and storage for crawler, hash indexes, quarantined copies, hot/cold storage.

Supplies And Consumables $318K/yr

[#5, #26] License renewals for forensic suites and miscellaneous consumables/office overhead for the program.

Research And Monitoring $300K/yr

[#2] Ongoing ML model retraining, audits, and model operations (.AIC-5124 maintenance).

Replacement Devices And Remediation $300K/yr

[#18] Replacement devices, data restoration, and civilian remediation (assumes ~300 incidents/year at ~$1k average).

International Coordination $275K/yr

[#16] Travel, local contractors, clandestine access, or legal work for foreign-hosted takedowns.

Darknet And P2P Monitoring $225K/yr

[#23] Tooling and analyst time to monitor torrents, darknet marketplaces, and offline media vectors.

Detection Webcrawler Operations $150K/yr

[#1] Hosting, updates, and operations cost for the webcrawler (continuous scanning).

Training And Drills $138K/yr

[#21] Red-team exercises, QA testing, and personnel training for detector & response workflows.

Backup And Wiping $130K/yr

[#22] Coordination and operations to purge caches, archived copies, and CDNs as needed.

Device Destruction Per Year $110K/yr

[#7] Per-device destruction recurring costs (assumes ~100 devices/year at midpoint per-device cost).

Seizure Ops Estimate Per Year $62K/yr

[#6] Annual estimate for per-seizure transport/consumables (assumes ~50 seizures/year at midpoint cost).

Facilities Maintenance $60K/yr

[#4] Ongoing maintenance, power, and repairs for air-gapped lab and hardened servers.

Data Center Power $55K/yr

[#19] Electricity for air-gapped labs, GPU clusters, UPS/generator fuel/maintenance.

Secure Comms And Opsec $55K/yr

[#20] Licenses, audits, and ongoing OPSEC tooling/training costs.

Detention Operations Per Year $55K/yr

[#14] Operational cost for short-term holding and secure interview/detention days (assumes ~100 detainee-days/year).

Evidence Storage And Legal Hold $28K/yr

[#15] Long-term digital & physical evidence storage, climate control, and legal hold maintenance.

Honeypot Operations Per Year $11K/yr

[#11] Hosting and monitoring costs for decoy low-traffic sites.

Logistics And Transport $0/yr

[]

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $8.6M/yr

78.0% probability / year

Normal year with routine detections, maintenance, occasional seizures, and no large-scale outbreak.

routine_detections isolated_manual_introductions

🚨 Minor Incident $9.1M/yr

20.0% probability / year +$500K vs baseline

Isolated but labor-intensive incident (several site seizures, targeted takedowns, legal actions, limited replacements/amnestic treatments).

isolated_manual_introductions single-site_outbreak multiple_seizures

🚨 Major Outbreak $58.6M/yr

2.0% probability / year +$50.0M vs baseline

Large-scale infection of major cloud backups/CDNs or mass device infection requiring global emergency response and mass remediation/amnesticization.

cdn_or_cloud_scale_infection mass_device_infection global_backup_contamination

👥 Personnel 30 total

Role	Count	Notes
Security Officer / MTF Agent	10	[#8, #14] Rapid-reaction teams for seizures, field ops, and secure transport; includes 2 teams of ~5.
Cybersecurity Analyst / SRE / ML Engineer	10	[#1, #2, #3, #9] Core team to run crawler, operate .AIC-5124, SRE support for compute/storage, and incident analysis.
Research Scientist	3	[#2, #25] Staff for R&D on detection models and long-term neutralization research.
Medical Officer	2	[#13] Small medical/amnestic team for treatments and aftercare.
Engineer / Maintenance	2	[#4, #19] Facility engineers for air-gapped lab, power systems, and equipment maintenance.
Administrative Staff	2	[#10, #12, #16] Admin/coordinators for legal contracts, international coordination, and PR/cover logistics.
Site Director / Executive Staff	1	[#26] Program-level oversight and executive coordination.

📋 Confidence Notes

Analyst notes provide detailed line items and plausible ranges but many costs are wide-ranging and incident frequencies are uncertain; contingency sizing (emergency reserve) dominates one-time estimates and increases uncertainty.

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