Discord within Anonymous over Facebook attack

Unofficial leader Sabu slams fellow members' plans to bring down the social networking site, highlighting internal divisions within the hactivist organisation

Hacktivist group Anonymous has today revealed internal divisions as high-profile member and unofficial spokesperon Sabu publicly criticised fellow members' plans to attack social networking site Facebook.

Referring to the planned attack, codenamed 'Op Facebook', Sabu said via his Twitter account:

"It's not an OP because no one is running it and they simply don't have the power to, or know how to hurt facebook."

This suggests that although the group claims to have no leader, there are senior members with the hacktivist collective who run the group's projects.

Previous operations have included attacks on PayPal and MasterCard in support of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

Sabu also called the feasibility of the Facebook attack into question, explaining that a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) action would be unlikely to succeed against a site with Facebook's traffic-processing capacity.

"Explain to me how you would takedown facebook? DDoS it? It's got as many dcs [data centres] as google."

DDoS attacks bombard a site with hits until its capacity to display pages to the internet is full, depriving other users of its services, and depriving the service of genuine traffic.

However, fellow Anonymous member 'AnonymousEFG' hit back, seemingly claiming that the attack is still on.

"It isn't not an op just because you say it's not," he stated.

In December 2010, Anonymous attempted to bring Amazon offline as part of its operation supporting WikiLeaks. However, the attack failed due to the elasticity of the online retailer's bandwidth. It was able to bring more servers online to cope with the additional traffic without feeling significant strain.

It seems that Sabu is acknowledging that this new operation against Facebook could fail in the same way.

Anonymous' intention to attack Facebook was announced recently via a YouTube video, where a heavily disguised voice stated:

"Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms meaning they can spy on people from all around the world."

According to the video, which has been viewed over 2.2 million times and has over 25,000 'likes', the attack will take place on 5 November this year.