Terms like “cyber-war” have been used a lot in the wake of the recent denial-of-service attacks on MasterCard, Visa and other entities that cut off support for WikiLeaks. But do these attacks really qualify? An analysis by network security firm Arbor Networks suggests that they don’t, and that what we have seen from the group Anonymous and “Operation Payback” is more like vandalism or civil disobedience. And we should be careful about tossing around terms like cyber-war — some believe the government is just itching to find an excuse to adopt unprecedented Internet monitoring powers, and cyber-war would be just the ticket.

The “info-war” description has been used by a number of media outlets in referring to the activities of Anonymous, the loosely organized group of hackers — associated with the counter-culture website known as 4chan — who have been using a number of Twitter accounts and other online forums to coordinate the attacks on MasterCard and others over the past week. But the idea got a big boost from John Perry Barlow, an online veteran and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Federation, who said on Twitter that:

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.

As stirring an image as that might be, however — especially to suburban teenagers downloading a DDoS script from Anonymous, who might like to think of themselves as warriors in the battle for truth and justice — there is no real indication that Operation Payback has even come close to being a real “info-war.” While the attacks have been getting more complex, in the sense that they are using a number of different exploits, Arbor Networks says its research shows that they are still relatively puny and unsophisticated compared with other hacking incidents in the past.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks like the kind Operation Payback has been involved with have definitely been ramping up in size over the past few years, Arbor says, with large “flooding attacks” involving as much as 50 gigabytes gigabits per second of data or more, something that can overwhelm data centers and carrier backbones.

So were the Operation Payback strikes against Amazon, MasterCard, Visa and a Swedish bank (which cut off funds belonging to WikiLeaks) in this category? No, says Arbor.

Were these attacks massive high-end flooding DDoS or very sophisticated application level attacks? Neither. Despite the thousands of tweets, press articles and endless hype, most of the attacks over the last week were both relatively small and unsophisticated. In short, other than than intense media scrutiny, the attacks were unremarkable.

In other words, the most impressive thing about the attacks is the name of the easily downloadable tool they employ, which hackers like to call a “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” or LOIC for short (there are also a couple of related programs with minor modifications that are known as the “High Orbit Ion Cannon” and the “Geosynchronous Orbit Ion Cannon”). But unlike a real ion cannon, the ones used by Operation Payback only managed to take down the websites of their victims for a few hours at most. Amazon’s website and services weren’t even affected by the group, which eventually gave up trying.

As Arbor notes in its blog post on the attacks, however, real cyber-war is something the U.S. government and other governments are very interested in, for a variety of reasons — and it has a lot more to do with malicious worms such as Stuxnet, which seeks out and disables specific machinery in a deliberate wave of sabotage, than it does some DDoS attacks run by voluntary bot-nets such as the one organized by Anonymous. Among other things — as investigative journalism Seymour Hersh noted in a recent New Yorker piece entitled “The Online Threat: Should We Be Worried About a Cyber War?” — such a war would give the military even more justification for monitoring and potentially having back-door access to networks and systems, allegedly to defend against foreign attacks.

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If the WikiLeaks saga was a comic book, it would be starting to look a lot like the Justice League of America vs. the League of Supervillians — or maybe it’s more like Star Wars, with the plucky rebel alliance up against the might of the Empire. As the U.S. government and a variety of corporations such as Visa and PayPal keep up the pressure on the document-leaking organization that they see as a traitor and a scofflaw, a rough alliance of supporters have taken it upon themselves to wage a cyber-war in its defense by attacking the websites of those and other companies.

Leading the fight is a shadowy group called Operation Payback, which in turn is loosely affiliated with Anonymous, an organization (although that term makes it sound more co-ordinated than it really is) that grew out of the alternative website 4chan, and became infamous for its attacks on Scientology, among other things. At last check, the Operation Payback site itself was offline — another symptom of the back-and-forth battle in which the group has been co-ordinating “distributed denial of service” or DDOS attacks on Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard. Also in this loose federation are The Pirate Bay — the file-sharing operation based in The Pirate Part of Sweden, which has been providing servers for the WikiLeaks documents — and Flattr, the “tip jar” service that is now one of the few ways to donate money to WikiLeaks, and was founded by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard have cut off support for WikiLeaks in the past week, despite the fact that it’s not clear the organization has actually done anything illegal by publishing classified military documents (something the New York Times and The Guardian have also done). In a statement on its website, Operation Payback quoted digital guru John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said on Twitter that “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” Operation Payback added that:

While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

It’s not clear how much disruption the group and its supporters have been able to create, however. MasterCard’s website was down for at least part of Wednesday, but the company said its cardholders and payment systems were not affected. PayPal said that it suffered a denial-of-service attack on Monday but that it was dealt with fairly rapidly. By mid-day Wednesday, Operation Payback had moved on to its next target — Visa, whose website went down within minutes of the group posting about the attack on Twitter. The website for the Swedish bank that froze WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s accounts went down for at least part of Tuesday, but the bank’s other operations appeared to be unaffected.

In other words, the Empire remains strong. Meanwhile, after sending out a plea for ways to keep the site up and running following the removal of DNS services by its provider EveryDNS, the organization now has over 1,200 mirror sites set up — many of them in Europe — through which it can publish any documents instantly. The site has also taken a number of other steps that will make it virtually impossible to remove it completely from the Internet (including having at least some of its servers hosted by The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing network based in Sweden) and Assange has said that there are over 10,000 sites that have full copies of the diplomatic cables.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
• What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Julian Fong