The exploit involved the very powerful (500KW) Aspidistra transmitter, coupled to a directional antenna farm. With that power, they could make it sound like a local station in the target area.

With a staff of fake announcers, a fake German band, and recordings of recent speeches from high-ranking Nazis, they would smoothly switch from merely relaying the German network to emulating it with their own staff. They could then make modifications to news broadcasts, occasionally creating panic and confusion.

German transmitters were switched off during air raids, to prevent them from being used as navigational aids for bombers. But many were connected into a network and broadcast the same content. When a targeted transmitter switched off, Aspidistra began transmitting on their original frequency, initially retransmitting the German network broadcast as received from a still-active station. As a deception, false content and pro-Allied propaganda would be inserted into the broadcast. The first such "intrusion" was carried out on March 25, 1945, as shown in the operations order at the right.

On March 30, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Berlin and Hamburg frequencies warning that the Allies were trying to spread confusion by sending false telephone messages from occupied towns to unoccupied towns. On April 8, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Hamburg and Leipzig channels to warn of forged banknotes in circulation. On April 9, 1945, there were announcements encouraging people to evacuate to seven bomb-free zones in central and southern Germany. All these announcements were false.

The German radio network tried announcing "The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on our frequencies. Do not be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority." The Aspidistra station made similar announcements, to cause confusion and make the official messages ineffective.

Obviously, as a practical stage one, Lexar is selling a private-label Eye-Fi Share as the Lexar Shoot-n-Sync using. Same price, same features.

What I'm waiting for, which will likely take into 2009, is for Lexar and Eye-Fi to announce partnerships with a major camera maker or two that will allow the Lexar or Eye-Fi card to talk directly to the camera to control battery savings mode, as well as other details. Conceivably, a camera that supports an external GPS (like the new Nikon D90) could allow the Eye-Fi to retrieve coordinates and perform assistive GPS using its Wi-Fi positioning software, and so forth. There's a lot of potential.

I observed that provided one considered “real” aardvarks and zebras — addresses that received good email amongst the spam — then aardvarks got 35% spam and zebras a mere 20%.

This has been widely picked up, first in the Guardian, and later in many other papers as well (even in Danish). However, many of these articles have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. So besides mentioning A and Z, it looks as if I should have published this figure from the paper as well…

… the point being that the effect I am describing has little to do with Z being at the end of the alphabet, and A at the front, but seems to be connected to the relative rarity of zebras.

As you can see from the figure, marmosets and pelicans get around 42% spam (M and P being popular letters for people’s names) and quaggas 21% (there are very few Quentins, just as there are very few Zacks).

There are some outliers in the figure: for example “3″ relates to spammers failing to parse HTML properly and ending up with “3c” (a < character) at the start of names. However, it isn’t immediately apparent why “unicorns” get quite so much spam, it may just be a quirk of the way that I have assessed “realness”. Doubtless some future research will be able to explain this more fully.

Today, allow me to update you on FAIR and the movement towards a formal, open standard.  There’s a couple of cool things going on in our little risk-world.

First, The Open Group Security Forum continues to move towards a formal adoption of FAIR.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN “WE” - YOU GOT A STANDARDS BODY IN YOUR POCKET OR SOMETHING?

Our meeting in Chicago a few weeks ago was great, but also slightly disturbing for me. I got pronoun-confusion syndrome.   I’m used to using the “we” pronoun to refer to RMI, or Jack and myself as we vet the models.  So without even thinking I would said “we have been looking at how loss occurs, and may want to change the model some” and The Open Group Members freaked out (rightfully so).  Adrian Seccombe gently reminded me that the “we” was now the Security Forum, and that “we” didn’t go changing things at will without vetting against each other.  Man I love this stuff.  I get to run our thoughts and ideas past some great folks now - you know, those smart people who tend to have really complex problems and are trying hard to solve them.

Formal Adoption:  Soon, Very Soon Now

Formal Adoption basically means we’ve made this document, everyone is close to saying that they generally like it, and once that finally happens then “bam”, we’re ready to move onward and upward with better things (see Cookbooks, below).  We’ve got a couple of changes to the current document that have been requested that aren’t a big deal.  For example, one request is that we make some statement about general applicability of FAIR to risk domains outside of the IT realm.   But once additions like that and others are done, this long process should be complete.

New Document Moving Towards Public Release:

We’ve got a basic document that should be public in the next few weeks on “What Makes a Good Risk Assessment Methodology” - written by yours truly and Jack.  It’s a very high-level document, and serves two purposes:

• For novices it helps parse out what is important in any undertaking to understand corporate risk (the repeated discussions on the ISO 27001 mailing list make me think it would be a place ripe for such a document).
• For those who “know” risk, it helps to re-establish some fundamental principles like the use of scales (ratio, please), the implications of dealing in probabilities, what attributes like consistency and defensibility mean, how “risk” should be reported to the business (something you know, meaningful) and so on.

When this doc is deemed ready for public consumption I’ll be sure to post on this blog here.

COOKBOOKS, EUROPEAN AGENCIES, AND, IRON CHEF “RISK” - WHOSE CUISINE WILL REIGN SUPREME?

One interesting thing that came up in the Chicago meeting was that ENISA (The European Network and Information Security Agency) developed a very nice document that reviewed something like 18 different risk assessment methodologies against their Criteria for Goodness.  FAIR was one of the ones they reviewed, and we (the royal “we” used there to include all us FAIR-Folk) did awfully well.  Things of interest:

1. They based their work on the current introduction paper which is not at all a step-by-step guide towards an organizational risk assessment (what ENISA really wanted) and we did pretty well.  Well enough that if we had developed a paper along the lines of NIST 800-30 or OCTAVE for the use of FAIR in a formal process, we could have done really, really well.  Like won-the-bake-off kind of well.
2. FAIR is actually not at all incongruous to many of the risk assessment methodologies offered, and in fact compliments many of them by letting those methodologies develop real, structured probabilities.  Think OCTAVE, where they basically say “math is (probabilities are) hard, so if you want to do them for reals, good luck!  But here’s a nonsensical way to do things if you want to believe in magic-fairy risk“.  FAIR fits right in there by stomping on the magic-fairy risk with the jack-boots of rationality.  FAIR similarly helps other risk standards that might lack structured probability development.

So The Open Group Security Forum decided that though we could create a new document and totally p0wn any future ENISA bake-off, there wasn’t much demand for the development of that documentation by the membership  - a point which was made quite apparent at the beginning of the discussion when one large European company CISO asked “What’s ENISA?”  Relevancy is everything, I suppose.

But that second item up there - the one about helping rather than competing with other “risk assessment methodologies” - really struck a chord.  So “we” (The Security Forum) are going to develop some “Cookbooks” that basically are high-level documents that say “If you want to use FAIR with (OCTAVE/COSO/CoBIT/Whatever) here’s how it fits, makes it better, and improves your life.  I’m pretty excited about these, and our first document looks like it’s going to be COSO integration.

THE OPEN GROUP SECURITY FORUM - THEY’RE A TRUSTING BUNCH (WITH QUALIFICATION, OF COURSE)

Finally, many people have asked me “Why work with The Open Group?”  There are many reasons, to be sure, but I will give you one example.  Members of the Security Forum there are not only great at vetting the model and getting consensus on risk and risk factors - but they’re quick to start applying.  So in Chicago, I thought I’d be talking about FAIR and the standard and fighting groupthink.  Nope.  Not at all.  In fact, the forum members spent more time suddenly discussing use of FAIR in a new Trust Model they’re developing.  So all of the sudden, I’m part of a new and exciting project to develop a Trust Model - how cool is that?  While formal adoption of the Trust Model will be necessarily long and deliberate - the collaboration and development is happening much faster than I can keep up with.  But if you all will allow me, it will help me get my head around it all by blogging about it later this week.  So be prepared to read about me dealing in “Trust” a little bit.

I've since fixed the problem, so your comments should show up sooner. Sorry for any confusion!

The two CEP/ESP related Water’s categories were, Best Streaming Data Management Solution and Best Complex Event Processing Solution.    Water’s awards Best Streaming Data Management Solution to data/event stream processing company StreamBase; and then awards Best Complex Event Processing Solution to Oracle’s BEA product, which is built on top of another data/event stream processing engine.  Confused?   

Alexander Alves,  currently employed by Oracle, previously having worked for BEA Systems, in Best Complex Event Processing Solution, observes:

“Regardless, I find it intriguing that Waters not only does not state the differences between the categories, but also uses the term CEP several times in the SDMS category.

I guess the verdict is that there is still confusion amongst the experts regarding event and stream processing… And that both products must be very good.”

Of course, Alex must be politically correct, and rightly so, since he works for Oracle/BEA and Water’s gave them an award.  But on what tangible, objective basis for Best Complex Event Processing Solution?

According to our 2007 survey, CEP/EP Reference Customers 2005-2007, BEA was in last place based on public CEP/EP reference clients.  

Waters’ award  for Best Streaming Data Management Solution to StreamBase is a much more credible.   Congratulations StreamBase.   Most would agree that StreamBase is a streaming data management solution (SDMS), but so are Apama and Coral8 (and BEA etc etc).   

Waters simply muddies the water, unfortunately.