SCP-5721 — SCP-5721 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-5721 Unknown ? low confidence

SCP-5721

Expected annual

$14.4M

One-time setup

$5.7M

Annual recurring

$13.6M

Personnel

Estimated one-time setup costs are roughly $5.67M driven by R&D, isolated test environments, and platform/alternative development; recurring annual costs are roughly $13.63M driven by staff wages, R&D/monitoring, alternative-platform operations, productivity loss, and diversion/PR operations.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $5.7M

Initial Research And Lab Setup $4.5M

[#6, #8, #9, #12] Monitoring data-capture infrastructure, R&D program setup, air-gapped honeypot/test environments, and initial alternative-platform development.

Facilities $500K

[#16] Building/reserving clinical/containment/medical space for quarantine and treatment.

Equipment $355K

[#3, #19] Network appliance hardware (firewalls/UTM) and specialized shielding/Faraday/TEMPEST lab gear.

Policy Legal Rollout $100K

[#1] One-time policy and legal drafting costs for corporate/cover-company policy changes and rollout.

Secure Logging $60K

[#7] Secure archival, chain-of-custody system setup and encrypted backup initial costs.

Decommissioning Cleanup $60K

[#27] Cost to remove honeypots, purge data, and perform secure destruction/post-containment cleanup.

Mdm Deployment $40K

[#2] Initial deployment / consulting costs for MDM configuration and rollout.

Network Filtering Services $30K

[#3] One-time professional services for firewall/proxy/DNS sinkhole deployment and signature development.

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $13.6M/yr

Research And Monitoring $3.3M/yr

[#6, #7, #8, #9, #24] Ongoing monitoring (analysts/cloud/storage), secure logging storage maintenance, R&D program recurring costs, honeypot maintenance, and ML/model upkeep.

Staff Wages $2.0M/yr

[#18] Salaries for analysts, sysadmins, legal, ops, moderation and outreach staff (core dedicated team).

Productivity Loss $2.0M/yr

[#26] Estimated recurring productivity impact from removing Discord for a 2,000-person organization (approx. 1% productivity hit assumption).

Alternative Platform Ops $1.3M/yr

[#12] Hosting, ops, moderation and ongoing run costs for Foundation-approved alternative chat/VoIP services.

Diversion Campaign $1.0M/yr

[#11] Covert public-relations / behavior-diversion campaigns to encourage migration off Discord (targeted, covert scale).

Emergency Response Reserve $1.0M/yr

[#17] Annual contingency reserve to fund emergency shutdowns, legal takedowns and remediation.

Bandwidth And Cdn $500K/yr

[#13] Bandwidth, CDN, DDoS protection and high-volume hosting costs for monitoring and alternative platforms.

Pr Damage Control Reserve $500K/yr

[#25] Annual reserve for PR damage control, gag orders, reimbursements and media management as-needed.

Cover Story And Legal $310K/yr

[#1, #10] Recurring legal counsel, liaison work with platform providers/GoIs and small ongoing policy updates; includes annual legal support from item #1 and liaison costs from item #10.

Front Company Maintenance $300K/yr

[#20] Maintenance and cover costs for front companies operating alternative platforms and PR fronts.

International Legal Support $300K/yr

[#23] Multi-jurisdictional legal counsel for cross-border data collection and compliance.

Mdm Licensing $250K/yr

[#2] Annual licensing/support for MDM per-device enforcement across ~2,000 devices.

Insurance And Legal Defense $200K/yr

[#22] Insurance premiums and legal defense fund for potential litigation arising from containment measures.

Cybersecurity Retainer $150K/yr

[#14] External incident response/cyber-forensics retainer and regular pentesting.

Medical And Psych Support $150K/yr

[#16] Ongoing psychiatric care and medical follow-up support for affected staff/public.

Influence Operations $100K/yr

[#21] Payments to moderators/community managers, seeded content and covert community incentives.

Byod Compliance $80K/yr

[#4] Auditors, HR time, training and spot audits to enforce BYOD restrictions.

Facilities Maintenance $75K/yr

[#16] Ongoing maintenance/upkeep for clinical/containment spaces.

Employee Training Estimate $60K/yr

[#5] Annual delivery/tracking costs for training and refresher courses for 2,000 employees.

Forensic Audits $40K/yr

[#15] Third-party forensic and privacy compliance audit costs.

Network Filtering Support $15K/yr

[#3] Ongoing support and signature updates for network filtering and IDS/UTM systems.

Supplies And Consumables $0/yr

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Logistics And Transport $0/yr

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⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $13.6M/yr

65.0% probability / year

Normal year with no major incidents; routine containment, monitoring, R&D and diversion operations continue.

no major breaches steady monitoring and diversion operations

🚨 Minor Incident $14.1M/yr

25.0% probability / year +$500K vs baseline

Localized incident (targeted leak, small-scale breach or legal skirmish) requiring extra cyber-forensics and PR actions.

targeted breach small public disclosure

🚨 Major Breach $18.6M/yr

7.0% probability / year +$5.0M vs baseline

Significant breach or escalation requiring large emergency response, medical cases, major remediation and wider legal actions.

widespread data leakage mass exposure or multiple medical cases

🚨 Political Exposure $23.6M/yr

3.0% probability / year +$10.0M vs baseline

Public/political exposure or litigation (class actions, regulatory action, cross-border political pressure) forcing expansive legal/PR and compensation actions.

major public leak regulatory or intergovernmental escalation

👥 Personnel 15 total

Role	Count	Notes
Research Scientist	4	[#18] Scientists leading neutralization research and experiments.
ML Engineer / Data Scientist	3	[#18] Model development, retraining, and monitoring pipelines for signature detection.
System Administrator	2	[#18] Ops and infrastructure maintenance for monitoring, honeypots and alternative platforms.
Legal Counsel	2	[#18] Ongoing counsel for privacy/compliance, liaison with platforms and GoIs.
Outreach / Influence Specialist	2	[#18] PR/diversion campaign designers, front-company operatives and community seeding staff.
Moderation Staff	2	[#18] Day-to-day moderation and community management for alternative platforms.

📋 Confidence Notes

Estimates are low-confidence due to wide ranges in analyst notes, large scenario-dependent variance (small internal policy posture vs global neutralization), and uncertainty about anomaly scope and required R&D/scale.

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