Anonymous, or to be more literal, some crank claiming to speak for Anonymous, has issued a YouTube press release.. Yes, a YouTube “press release”, thats a new one for me as well, but not a surprise since it is quite clearly far more effective than the more traditional format. As you might imagine, most of the media would have simply ignored it, but doing it via YouTube has already yielded over 2 million hits.
Anyway, what they have announced is “Operation Facebook” and the plan is to destroy them on Nov 5. One word … “why?”, well here are a few snippits for you to snigger at:
Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed.
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Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.
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You cannot hide from the reality in which you, the people of the internet, live in. Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government.
They might wish all this to perhaps conjurer up images of some clandestine organization operating from a secret base inside a volcano (white cat optional), but in reality, it brings to mind a couple of geeky kids posting from the basement of their mom’s house.
Why Nov 5 – well think Guy Fawkes. And if that still confuses you, its Alan Moor’s V for Vendetta comic book. Folks motivated by religion (think Islam or Bible) are scary fanatics, they believe in an afterlife and are quite willing to die. However, folks motivate and inspired by a comic book … well, I think you are beginning to see why I simply cannot take this seriously.
So what can they actually do remotely?
- Hack in and obliterate their systems – I suspect Facebook will not be stupid enough to leave holes in their firewall, as some others have done, and they will also have changed default passwords, so their only hope here is an inside job : At best a bit of minor disruption
- A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) – basically flood the Facebook systems : except … well I not sure they understand just how big and hardened the FB systems are now … at best slow things down a bit, but crash … nope, I’m skeptical. The FB folks are not complete idiots, they have been targeted before (think “Lets draw Mohammad day” FB groups), so will already have hardened systems with all the usual defenses: Firewalls, Switches, Routers, front-end interception, sink-holing, pipe-cleaning etc…
Conclusion: An event inspired by a comic book to scale the walls of the Zuckerberg fortress? … it will be a none event.
Still, if you are up for a laugh then here is the text … and below is the actual video.
Ex-ter-min-ate, ex-ter-min-ate! Send for Dr Who.