Category Archives: History

History, Poetry, Security

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

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Today marks Armistice Day, the 1918 surrender of Germany that ended hostility on the Western Front in World War I.

It also is known as Veteran’s Day in the US, thanks to sentiment from Kansas, as I have written before.

Poppies are used for remembrance in reference to one of the most heavily contested areas of Europe, Flanders, which sits between French, German and British control. The flowers grew all around the battlefields and expanding cemeteries of Belgium.

A poem called “In Flanders Fields” was written by Canadian Colonel John McCrae while fighting there and published in 1915:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.


Poster from the Canadian War Department

The reference to crosses is not universal for more reasons than one might expect. Today the German news points out that some of the dead are treated differently from the other casualties in Flanders.

The Langemark cemetery is the final resting place of 44,294 German soldiers. More than half of them are buried in one mass grave, the Kameraden Grab, their names etched on large dark plaques running alongside the site.

[Andre de Bruin, a World War I guide and founder of Over The Top Tours] points to rows of gravestones that lie flat on ground, explaining: “Belgium imposed very strict restrictions on German memorials. Headstones were not allowed to stand, not like those of the Commonwealth soldiers and there were many other rules that applied only to Germans.”

There were hundreds of burial sites of German soldiers after 1918 but in the 1950s, Belgium ordered that the bodies be regrouped in no more than four sites, of which Langemark is one.

“It was probably done out of hatred for what happened, especially during World War II when Belgium was occupied. They even forbade the use of crosses above the headstones,” de Bruin said.

Food, History, Security

Breaking the Law With High Fructose Corn Syrup

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The Public Health Advocacy Institute has dropped a wet blanket over the high fructose corn syrup lobby. The lobby has claimed sugar is always sugar, no matter what, based on measured levels of fructose. To prove their point using propaganda they have started to pressure the government to allow corn syrup to be hidden with the label corn sugar.

While they play games with the names, actual fructose measurements are in and it does not look good for high fructose corn syrup. It turns out that it has…high fructose.

A report on October 27th from the PHAI is thus titled: Discovery of Elevated Fructose Levels in Popular Soft Drinks Raises Important Legal Questions for Regulators and Consumers

Laboratory testing revealed that bottled full-calorie Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Sprite had fructose estimates of 64-65%, well in excess of the upper-level of 55% fructose generally recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration

These levels not only put them in excess of safe levels, defined by others, but also at odds with their own claims to safety.

…the representation that HFCS is “compositionally equivalent” to table sugar could amount to false and misleading advertising requiring action by the Federal Trade Commission and State Attorneys General.

Fructose was isolated and extracted from corn in America during 1970s after President Nixon’s economic advisers demanded that payments for corn surplus should be put to some kind of use. Leaders of the country at that time balked at the idea of paying farmers to grow something and then do nothing with it, so they set about to manufacture demand. The very recent origin of high fructose corn syrup was thus driven by an artificial (US Patent 3,689,362 by Yoshiyuki Takasaki in 1972) urgency related to farm politics, as I have discussed before.

I could also point out the political importance of high fructose corn syrup comes from an even older issue of national concern. The reason corn syrup has been made cheaper to use in processed foods than sugar is due to import quotas that restrict America’s supply of sugar.

Before artificial corn sweeteners were made in America the US Marines were called into action to invade the state of Hawaii in 1894 and overthrow the Queen. This was to ensure access to sugar. American plantation owners feared they would lose their land to the Queen if she maintained power. They formed a “Committee of Safety to overthrow the Kingdom” and found a sympathetic ear in the US Secretary of State, James Blaine. He had suggested in 1881 that the US would be better off invading Cuba, another rich source of sugar, than to let it sit in the hands of a European power.

The sugar of Hawaii is not enough to meet demand today. This makes me wonder if Blaine had realized the safety risk present today from high fructose corn syrup in America, would he have pressed even more to annex Cuba? Alas, Cuba became independent and America continues to try and find ways to dispose of its corn surplus.

Food, History, Security

UK Water Poison Cover-up

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The BBC reveals that staff were told to ‘keep quiet’ after accidental Camelford poisoning.

Staff from a company involved in the UK’s worst mass water poisoning were told to keep quiet about what had happened, an inquest has been told.

Twenty tonnes of aluminium sulphate were accidentally added to the water supply in Camelford, Cornwall, in 1988.

A former manager at the South West Water Authority (SWWA) said senior managers did not want the public knowing what had gone wrong that July.

Three weeks passed before the public were alerted. The story gives examples of people who died from the poison.

History, Security

NIST on APT Protection

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I noticed in a NIST FAQ on Special Publication 800-37 (continuous monitoring) that guidance has been given to address Advanced Persistent Threats:

Finally, to enable cyber preparedness against the advanced persistent cyber threat, organizations must enhance risk management and information security governance in several areas. These include, but are not limited to: (i) development of an organizational risk management and information security strategy; (ii) integration of information security requirements into the organization’s core missions and business processes, enterprise architecture, and system development life cycle processes; (iii) allocation of management, operational, and technical security controls to organizational information systems and environments of operation based on an enterprise security architecture; (iv) implementation of a robust continuous monitoring program to understand the ongoing security state of organizational information systems; and (v) development of a strategy and capability for the organization to operate while under attack, conducting critical missions and operations, if necessary, in a degraded or limited mode.

There is nothing unusual in the text. I see no mention of protection against advanced attacks or persistent attacks. It would read the same whether or not APT was the attack vector.

What NIST really could have said was that continuous monitoring gives the upper hand against APT.

The fourth (iv) area is the most important. Persistent threats evolve over time so data sets must be maintained for longer periods and reviewed with a wider scope against a baseline (activity trends over three months, six months, etc.). Therefore continuous monitoring of controls plays directly into defending against APT by generating a larger and longer information feed, reducing the effectiveness of the attack vector. The tough part is making use of the data.

I spoke a about this in my recent presentation at RSA Europe. The Pope and the Magna Carta both tried to outlaw the crossbow. Why? It was thought to be unfair in battle. Anyone could pick one up and be quickly trained to kill, unlike a sword that took a lifetime of training. This meant the economics of battle shifted and defenders looked for ways to respond to the new attack. An expensive trained soldier was no longer effective against inexpensive mercenaries (peasants hired to kill).

Why did the Pope or King John’s detractors care about this? I suspect it had to do with who had access to what resources at the time. More money meant favor to the crossbow. King John, for example, could bring loads of troops from France carrying crossbows and fight the barons. Less money, more training, meant favor to the law against crossbows. The balance was shifted again when defenders found ways to exploit time required to reload the crossbow. Defenders only needed to make the attacker miss once while exposed and then a counter-attack by any means was highly effective. Then the crossbow men devised special shields to hide behind while reloading…and so on.

One weakness in the APT attack is found within its long intelligence gathering phase. Information collected over time may show changes from a baseline. This could not only be a way to detect incoming attacks but also potentially show awareness to the attacker and thus prevent them — attackers often move to a target with lower risk.