The hacker group, Anonymous has posted a warning on youtube that it will 'Destroy Facebook' on November 5 2011 - which is Guy fawkes night in the UK - not sure if this is a coincidence or not.

According to the video, the attacks are in retaliation against Facebook for selling private information, for abusing personal information and making it impossible for deleting user accounts.

This is not the first time that the hacking group have targeted social networks. A few weeks ago, they started their own social network called AnonPlus in reponse to Google deleting their google + account.

How seriously are we to take this threat? Is Facebook worried? Well it should be. The Facebook infrastructure is very fragile due to its huge size and massive traffic from all sorts of platforms and APIs. It doesn't take much for facebook to go down even without a DDOS attack, and it would be very difficult to defend the network whilst maintaining services. There is a growing anarchistic mood in the world at the minute, with riots in London and Protests across the world against governments and large corporations. This is fertile breeding ground for recruiting volunteers to help with the attack. When the last mass attack against the opponents of WikiLeaks took place (Operation Payback), this was with the help of thousands of people installing Low Orbit Ion Cannon - a program originally designed as a trojan virus to sit on an infected PC and silently be used as part of a zombie network - but now people are purposely installing the software to allow their machine to be used in mass DDOS attacks.

If Facebook are to survive the attack, they will need to prepare for war now.

** Update 18/8/2011 **

Anonymous have stated that Operation Facebook is not an official action but rather that some members of their group are planning the attack on their own. The video warning has been removed from YouTube now.