Colbert Explains Cyberwar

On the Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert provided some background on “the First Great Cyberwar” as the hacktivist collective Anonymous has dubbed it, the “Defend Assange” sub-mission of Operation Payback. Operation Payback started as a fight against anti-piracy measures, but has moved to attacking web sites seen to be impeding Wikileaks in its mission to release diplomatic cables via distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This includes sites that have frozen donations to Wikipedia like PayPal or Mastercard and the web sites of law enforcement and politicians either acting against or speaking out against Wikileaks or Anonymous itself.

“America is at Cyberwar, and lolcats says ‘I can has WMD’s?’” -Stephen Colbert

His guest in explaining the problem, Omar Wasow, presented himself well. Wasow is apparently best known from appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show, where he explained aspects of the Internet.

“Time’s person of the year is Mark Zuckerberg. Sorry Julian Assange, I guess you didn’t violate enough people’s privacy.” – Stephen Colbert

I just wish it had been an actual information security expert on the show. Wasow mentioned many of the right examples (the Gawker breach from earlier this week, DDoS attacks on Georgia) but forgot to mention Colbert’s own human distributed denial of service (DDoS) on Conservapedia.