'Anonymous' Hacker Group Threatens to 'Kill Facebook'

The hacker group that calls themselves 'Anonymous', have set out to proclaim that they will be targeting Facebook for misuse of personal information while at the same time inviting others to join their cause.

Over the course of the past few months this year, hacker groups such as LulzSec and the now famous 'Anonymous' hacker organization, have set their crosshairs on whomever does not support whistle-blower sites such as WikiLeaks.

Who is Anonymous?

The Anonymous hacker group has been politically motivated to conduct attacks on sites just because they disagree with their practices. Collectively, anyone involved with Anonymous is in support for the so-called illegal activities of WikiLeaks and all that they stood for during the controversial disclosure of large amounts of data from classified military reports.

Anonymous seems to have drawn a fine line between freedom of speech and taking actions against WikiLeaks or whomever they vouch for in their misconstrued idealism. Currently, security experts have not identified any real type of leadership within Anonymous but they remain to be very potent in their attacks.

Anonymous, among other recently active hacker groups, are known to conduct DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against large websites that they have some type of disagreement with. DDoS attacks are an act of flooding a specific site's server with large amounts of traffic until the server becomes unresponsive thus crashing and no longer serving visitors the web pages. They used a DDoS attack to take down government sites in the past such as the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Now they have set their eyes to do the same, in November of this year, against what the hackers called 'Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore' or what we know as 'Facebook'. The group has basically said they want to 'kill' Facebook, meaning take down the site. Anonymous has failed with various recent attacks such as an attempt to take down the Amazon website in December of 2010.

Why Choose to Attack Facebook?

The catalyst for the attack against Facebook is mainly due to Anonymous' unsubstantiated claim that Facebook somehow sells user information to government agencies for the purposes of spying on individuals.

The Anonymous threat video below, was posted to YouTube on July 16 threatening to 'kill' Facebook.

An exclusive video report from CNN, posted below, is from 2012 explaining why Anonymous matters and their suspected reasoning behind DDoS attacks.

In other allegations against Facebook in the past for mishandling personal information, Facbeook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with the following statement via an opinion piece posted on the Washington Post last year:

"We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want. We do not give advertisers access to your personal information. We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."

Some would argue that by conducting a DDoS attack against a website is not exactly 'hacking'. Contrary to that argument, a DDoS attack is just one aspect to hacking. As shared in the video above, it is explained how in the past hackers had to infect machines with malware to accomplish 'hacking' acts but now tools can be obtained and used to conduct DDoS attacks.

Even though the threat is very relevant, do you foresee a time when hacker groups such as Anonymous could actually take down large social networks such as Facebook?