Two Footballs, Two Biscuits, Two Presidents: A Cybersecurity Nightmare.

Last year I wrote about a biscuit and a football, but I wasn’t talking about the snack spread on game day.

I was talking about the tools the United States President uses (as Commander-in-Chief) for identity verification to launch a nuclear attack.

But sometimes you have to pass the football. If the President is temporarily or permanently incapacitated in an attack, the Vice President also has a football and a biscuit. Normally the Vice President’s biscuit isn’t activated, but when certain Constitutional criteria are met it becomes operative.

Other than this built-in redundancy, the system assumes one football, one biscuit, and one President.

If you’re a cybersecurity expert, you know this assumption is the assumption of a fool.

• It is not impossible to have duplicate functional footballs and duplicate functional biscuits.

• And it is not impossible to have duplicate functional Presidents, with identical face, voice, finger, and iris biometrics. Yes, it’s highly unlikely, but it’s not impossible. If the target is important enough, adversaries will spend the money.

And most of us will never know the answer to this question, but how do government cybersecurity experts prevent this?