It's 'Official': Operation Facebook Not Happening

The Anonymous threat to "destroy" Facebook on Guy Fawkes Day was as buzzworthy as it was dubious, with holes appearing in the story almost immediately. Now whoever is running the @OP_Facebook twitter feed has put perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the hacking operation that never was.

On Monday, @OP_Facebook tweeted this clarification about "Operation Facebook":

"ok im making one thing clear here, We Cant Take Facebook Down...Yet. This is an awareness campaign and spreading the word is good enough."

Other Twitter accounts associated with the loosely affiliated hacker collective had already distanced themselves from Operation Facebook, which now appears to have been intended as a campaign to persuade people to drop out of the social networking site rather than to hack it.

AnonOps, as close to a reliable mouthpiece as there is for goings-on within Anonymous writ large, initially distanced itself from Operation Facebook, though the de facto operational arm of the hacking group did later admit that individual "Anons" might legitimately be organizing an attempted takedown of the site.

Meanwhile, whether or not such an ambitious plan was really in the offing, security experts cast doubts on Anonymous' ability to pull off such a major operation, even at full strength. It's one thing to temporarily disrupt service for relatively low-powered sites like Gawker.com or CIA.gov through Anonymous' typical Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and quite another to knock a massive player with redundant resources like Facebook offline, they said.

The admission this week by @OP_Facebook that Operation Facebook was a non-starter as a hacking operation may seem non-noteworthy to some. After all, the video message that kicked off Operation Facebook (no longer available on YouTube) was posted back in July but was only picked up on by media in August, after its originators seems to have backed off the idea.

But the very fact that the media did help to create buzz around the idea of knocking Facebook offline gave the proposed operation legs—Twitter feeds and message boards certainly lit up with talk of shutting down Facebook last week.

And whether Operation Facebook was a hoax, a smokescreen, or most likely just a trial balloon, it certainly looks now like it's not going to happen on Nov. 5.