Can Anonymous Really Take Down Facebook?

Members of Internet hacking group Anonymous have set their sets on their latest target -- social networking king Facebook.

"Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed," the speaker said in a YouTube video, which was posted July 16 but started circulating widely this week.

Members of the group announced in a YouTube video that Facebook would be taken down on Nov. 5 in "Operation Facebook."

The group, known for attacking PayPal, Visa, and Amazon as well as federal and local law enforcement databases, doesn't appear to be in full agreement on the attack.

After the video began to pick up steam in the media, the Twitter account AnonOps, known as one of the primary communication sources for the group, tweeted out that "Operation Facebook" was a fake.

"Medias of the world ... stop lying!" the account said late Tuesday night. "#OpFacebook is just another fake! We don't "kill" the messenger. That's not our style."

On Wednesday though the account changed its tune a bit and stated that some Anonymous members were participating in an attempted takedown of Facebook, but the whole group was not involved.

"#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it," the account said.

Anonymous in the past has primarily taken Web sites down through Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, though there are questions as to whether that could take down Facebook for any considerable amount of time.

"Theoretically, any Web site can be taken down, if you have a large enough group of people who want to take it down,"Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser for Sophos, told PC Mag. "Certainly, we've seen Anonymous take on Facebook in the past, around the New Year. And there were some tweets from, I think, AnonOps, saying things like, 'Holy crap! We were only able to impact it for a few seconds.'"