Anonymous: Facebook is going down

Anonymous Facebook. The two don’t usually meet in the same sentence unless it’s about the destruction of anonymity. But now, it may be the other way around.

Hacktivist group Anonymous seemingly released an outline for their new operation, #OpFacebook, which plans to take down Facebook once and for all on November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day.

The release explained that Anonymous is going after Facebook because of privacy issues. The release claimed that Anonymous wants to destroy Facebook’s ability to “sell information to government agencies” and put an end to its practice of “giving clandestine access to information security firms.”

So, what is Anonymous? Who is Guy Fawkes? Why does he have his own day? And can Anonymous really destroy Facebook?

To the Wikipedia-mobile!

Anonymous is a group initiating active civil disobedience and spread through the Internet while staying hidden, originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.

So, basically, it’s a group of people who hang out on IRC channels and play Robin Hood on the Internet.

Guy Fawkes (13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

When appearing in public, members of Anonymous use the same Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the film V for Vendetta, a 2006 dystopian thriller.

At least some of the members of Anonymous are technically savvy digital hackers, who use their talents to bring down websites and crack security to steal confidential information.

So, how could they destroy Facebook?

To date, most of Anon’s attacks have been DDoS attacks or, in the case of Sony’s Playstation Network, through security holes, which allowed them to snag personal data, including credit card numbers.

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

Basically, what this means is that, somehow, the attacker(s) send a huge quantity of requests to the target, over and over again until the target’s resources are exhausted.

How security breaches occur are less obvious. And can involve listening to communication between two computers and intercepting passwords, brute force attacks in which a program continually tries different password combinations until it finds one that works and much much more.

Should Facebook be worried?

Yes. Anon has proven it can really screw with the big boys.

Will Facebook be destroyed?

No. There is no way that Anon could possibly destroy Facebook. Even a massively successful DDoS would only result in temporary downtime. And a security breach, while certainly bad PR, would not irrevocably damage Facebook’s reputation.

Should you be worried?

Maybe. If you’ve purchased Facebook credits in the passed, it’s possible that Anon will be able to swipe your credit card numbers. That’s highly unlikely, however, as we’re fairly certain that Facebook is smart enough to encrypt credit card numbers.

So, unless Anon has an inside guy or gal with the keys to the kingdom at Facebook, we don’t expect there to be a mass destruction of the world’s most popular site.

Although, the twisted side of us is curious to see what happens.