LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, TEXAS — The commanding general of America’s elite cyber unit, the “24th Air Force,” says his troops stand ready for battle if North Korea renounces its 57-year armistice.

“Their country has a grand total of 119 computers,” Major General Richard E. Webber told reporters today at a press conference. “Rest assured, we’re fully capable of destroying every one of them.” He asserted that “our contribution may very well be the turning point if we go back to war with North Korea. In fact, our Army might not even have to storm across the 38th parallel if the president calls on our expertise. We’re that good.”

The general revealed “most of their [North Korea's] computers are IBM PC-compatibles plucked from a South Korean junk yard. Some of them run DOS 4.0 and the rest run Windows 3.11. We’ll hack into every one of them and run an FDISK command.” After destroying all data, 24th Air Force will go after the hardware. “My combat coders will change the refresh rate on their monochrome Hercules monitors so it makes them go ‘pop,’ and then we’ll use a zero-day exploit to force the CPUs into an Nth-complexity infinite binary loop, which will physically damage the core processors.”

General Webber also revealed North Korea maintains three rack-mounted Pentium-III 500MHz servers running the Sun Solaris operating system. “One runs their .kp top level domain,” he said, “and another one is a host for two websites. The North Korean government has one website, and Kim Jong-il has a website devoted to himself.” The third Solaris server is supposed to act as a hot spare, “but right now some hacker-perverts in South Korea are using it to distribute child pornography.”

The general insisted that “if we are called upon by competent national command authority, my guys & gals will hack into two of those Solaris boxes with an old SendMail exploit,” he said. “We’ll get into the third OS by installing a rootkit directly into the Symantec antivirus software. Then it’s bye-bye North Korean websites and child porn.”

General Webber also revealed “one other computer, in the heart of the capital city, is an embedded Linux box that operates the country’s only street light. We’ll install algorithms to make it blink in ways that will snarl Pyongyang’s traffic like they’ve never seen before. Rickshaws will be trapped in gridlock for days when we get done with their critical infrastructure. It’ll make China’s gridlock look like the autobahn.”

Still, General Webber warned “an all-out cyber battle won’t be some sort of cakewalk. You can’t just strut into North Korea’s IP space and get away without a scratch.” Kim Jong-il personally trains up to 100 hackers each year “as part of an elite cyber force that could inflict horrifying damage to America’s critical ‘SCADA’ equipment if we let them.” The general warned that “our analysts believe there are at least 800 military hackers stationed in Pyongyang right now, all of them fully capable of striking at civilian targets running the Windows 95 and Microsoft Bob operating systems.”

Everyone in the United States is a target, General Webber stressed, “especially if you are a South Korean immigrant in the dry cleaning business, or if you are a Vietnamese refugee who runs an oriental restaurant, or if you came from India with enough cash to buy a C-store. We strongly believe North Korea will target point-of-sale computers in those sectors of the American economy.” He referred questions about securing those sectors to the Department of Homeland Security. “Twenty-fourth Air Force is only authorized to protect the United States military,” the general explained. “I wish I could protect immigrants and boat children, because we’re the absolute best at doing it, but that’s not what 24th Air Force was set up to do.”

When asked if 24th Air Force had already hacked into North Korea’s computers and was simply waiting for a “kill” order, the general responded “I’m not at liberty to say one way or another. Our fully operational mission capabilities are ultra-top secret, multi-sensitive compartmentalized, one-eyes only, mondo-need to know. I doubt if even the president himself knows what we’re fully capable of doing via our mission parameters…”

Twitter founder Biz Stone, speaking by phone on “The Colbert Report,” predicted his company will lose “thousands” of Twitter users in Iran “when the civil war begins.” Stone went on to say he’s “proud” to be stoking a civil war in a second-world country. “Twitter users around the world are dedicated to the notion of free speech. They’ll gladly give their lives in a hail of military gunfire so their children can freely type 140 characters into a cell phone.”

“I of course regret the fact Iran’s Revolutionary Guard will track down Twitter users and kill them for the capital crime of micro-blogging,” Stone added. “But that’s the power of Twitter for you.”

Stone went on to predict “millions of Twitter users” might die if North Korea invades South Korea as is widely expected. “South Koreans will be tweeting nonstop, and North Korean soldiers will have to kill them just to keep a lid on the news,” he said. “We’ll gladly postpone our routine maintenance if it will help more South Koreans to stand before a firing squad…”

An unretouched screenshot of the McAfee AVERT Labs Twitter account. Complete with F-bomb! Click on the image to see it in all its glory. It reads:

McAfeeAvertLabs China Starts Coordinated Internet Blackout Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary http://tinyurl.com/nmnvoh [RT @circleid:—

Decorum prevents me from quoting the rest of McAfee’s tweet.

Now go read this column…

The Obama administration has deleted an embarrassing piece of text from the president’s “60-day review” of cyber security. The report, released today, culminates a two-month study on the need for a cyber czar who would report directly to the White House, although perhaps not directly to the Computer-in-Chief himself.

The embarrassing text made its way into the report in its early stages, possibly typed by a staffer. Had it remained, the report would have warned the president that “U.S.-allied countries are in fact known to harbor terrorists who specialize in cyber operations that have destroyed billions of dollars of computing productivity over the years.”

The report goes on to say “A short list of countries with high-bandwidth links to the U.S. include allies such as Canada, which is known to be a haven for cyberterror operatives working to attack the United States. One such cyberterrorist, whose name is Michael Calce and who goes by the name ‘MafiaBoy,’ very nearly destroyed U.S. electronic commerce in 2000. Canada has refused over the years to extradite this individual to stand trial in America…”

An advisor to the president noticed the embarrassing text and ordered it redacted, a source tied to the report said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A spokeswoman for the White House would only say “the President stands by the contents of the final report, not a draft containing content that may or may not have been added or deleted at some point.”

Let’s hope it’s a fake Twitter site. I’d hate to think a cryptography demigod would choose a pink flowery background of his own volition and shout “who dares to disturb my mighty beard?” at his followers. Click here to read Bruce’s omnipotent tweets…

The U.S. Air Force may be feelin’ low over their failure to launch Cyber Command.  Let’s hope this latest string of recaptioned photos will give them something to laugh about…

Click here to see the new & improved photo captions.

Trau­matic brain over­load is common with infor­ma­tion over­loads caused by Inter­net explo­sive devices (IEDs) or pene­trating thoughts. These types of over­loads have become rela­tively common in U.S. mili­tary forces who have remotely logged into Iraq and Afghanistan…

Click here to read the full Air Force press release.

The famous “arrowhead insignia” will bolster morale among uniformed personnel, many of whom are longtime fans of the legendary TV shows & movies. “Our peer-equivalent Airmen will become more effective in cyber and space” because they’ll be wearing the same futuristic emblem on their uniforms…

Click here to read the full Air Force press release.

A “staff summary sheet” reveals that a retired four-star general “said he had heard that Chairforce.com played some sort of role in” the death of Air Force Cyberspace Command. “There is a .85 probability that [the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] was swayed to request [AFCYBER's] postponement based on the supposed humor at Chairforce.com…”

Click here to read the staff summary sheet.