anonymous to take out facebook nov 5

[applesnail]

long over due i think!

Hacktivist group Anonymous has announced it will take down Facebook and release Zynga's games for free download on 5 November if the latter does not backtrack on alleged plans to lay off 1,000 employees and outsource work.

News of the Guy Fawkes Night attack, #OP MaZynga, came a week after online gaming giant Zynga announced a five percent employee cull and the closure of its Boston office -- employees at its Austin branch were given two hours to clean out their desks while the world's attention was distracted by Apple's iPad mini unveiling on 23 October. Zynga also indicated its British and Japanese offices might close, and there are plans to switch maintenance of The Ville to its India base. Savings from the cuts should amount to between $15 million and $20 million (£9 million and £12 million).

The strategy might appear sound, considering the 75 percent drop in the developer's share price over the past year (though, since the cuts, things have already begun to look up). However, Zynga has also admitted to having a $1.6 billion (£1 billion) stash in cash and equivalents -- something that has evidently perturbed Anonymous.

"During the last few days anonymous has been targeting Zynga for the outrageous treatment of their employees and their actions against many developers," the hacking group announced in a YouTube video, which was almost immediately taken down because of the site's policy on the "depiction of harmful activities".

"We have come to believe that this actions of Zynga will result in massive layoff of a thousand people and legal actions against everyone that speaks to the public about this plan," the statement continued. "It will also come to end of the US game market as we know it as all this jobs will be replaced in other more convenient financial countries. With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behaviour of corporations like Zynga must change."

Anonymous claims to have access to leaked internal documents from Zynga executives that it initially posted online (these links have since been blocked) and plans to make public by publishing the key to the developer's data files -- if the company refuses to concede to its demands.

Extracts from these alleged documents are, however, pretty damning for Anonymous. They are written in the same unmistakable broken English the hacktivist group is known for, and are peppered with grammatical errors:

"Following the preliminary announced of this week the final strategy for the next two quarters has been successfully set to delivery by november 23 an additional but of 800 jobs with further raising of new capital from the market to support businesses. We've identified our global gambling strategy with bwin.party and as we speak discussions are progressing with a partner to cover the US market. Work is focused and on-going to completely outsource our development teams in our offices in Bangalore, India to hedge our position in the long term."

According to the statement, Zynga also plans to acquire the games Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Shove Prod and Music Invaders for $20 million (coincidentally, the same amount it will save on cuts). The documents' existence could be a complete falsity, or it might just be that Anonymous lost its access to the memos and decided to freestyle with a new transcription (unlikely).

Whatever the truth, or the validity of the group's claims that it has the ability to take down Facebook and release the games, it might be an idea to keep tabs on the Anonymous site this Fireworks' night for an onslaught of free-gaming fun.

Wired.co.uk contacted Zynga and YouTube for comment, but at the time of publishing neither had responded.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/30/anonymous-zynga-facebook-take-down

[Alice]

How hard is it to do? Shut down a website I mean? I've heard of people achieving this by having tonnes of people/bots visit a website all at once and it crashes, but does that work for something like facebook that is already set up for a billion simultaneous viewers?

[applesnail]

prob just ping it to death with denial of services attacks...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

[Foo]

Its pretty hard to take FB down with a DDODS attack. Its built to take a HUGE number of clicks per second, think about how many EXTRA requests youd need to send to make a difference.

[DarkSpark]

Its pretty hard to take FB down with a DDODS attack. Its built to take a HUGE number of clicks per second, think about how many EXTRA requests youd need to send to make a difference.

 

Facebook wont be crashed by DDoS it is very unlikely anyway. They have numerous backup servers and failsafes to make this not the case, I would say it is more likely they are looking to hack the servers and initiate a shutdown on them from internally, though even this is one heck of a feat.

The thing that shits me is that the downturn in profits is due to the lack of newly released games under their banner (in my opinion). people get sick of paying for in game bonuses after a while and they lose their sheen. Likewise people get over the games in generall and advertisers dont get the hits they want. i personally think that once this layoff goes ahead and they buy the new games you will see profits steadily rise again. I think this is why anonymous is threatening. They could spend some of their savings to buy new games and market them but instead they opt to fire a substantial amount of employees to fund this venture. And then outsource the work to the cheapest slave labor country they can find. But i guess this is how pretty much all big business works these days "100% Australian owned but 100% made in china" All of this masked under the guise of their profits being low.

edit: also they are planning to relase TYLER on the 5/11/12

Edited November 4, 2012 by DarkSpark

[Distracted]

'They' promised us this last year. Nothing happened.

[santiago]

this is ridiculous, how will people manage to live without facebook

[Psylo]

 

 

[Bigred]

where is guy fawkes when you need him

[whitewind]

The takedown of facebook would do what exactly? Piss off millions of morons who couldn't give a shit about a few hackers? Allow governments to introduce ever-more fascist rules and regulations with the full support of millions of facebook fans who so desperately need the freedom to post moronic shit about their personal lives every minute of every day?

[at0m]

Cute, anon are at it again. Their cause is often one I somewhat agree with but their methods are a joke. They are given far too much credit.

[chnt]

misdirection perhaps

[Bigred]

Face book is rapidly losing ground to a lot of other sites soon it will go the way of my space. I think thats one of the major reasons it went public

and to take it down hypothetically would be to infiltrate the main servers and do a guy fawkes . Then use hackers to attack the smaller targets

one giant emp would be handy but you would have to take it into the facility as they are normally housed in bunkers the problem is not

face book as such but rather the company with these servers and what shity site they will create next next

[Stillman]

Didn't Guy Fawkes get caught fail to kill the king and get executed? My kind of hero lol

edit. My point is if I was gonna do something like this I probably wouldn't do it on a day remembering a FAILED terrorist lol.

Edited November 5, 2012 by Stillman

[Bigred]

i know but if you could tunnel under facebook like he did with parliament

[Alice]

So did they take out facebook?

[nabraxas]

Didn't Guy Fawkes get caught fail to kill the king and get executed? My kind of hero lol

so you like religious nutcases (Catholic in this case) who use explosives to overthrow other religions/states that don't follow their faith?

[Anodyne]

So they celebrated Guy Fawkes' Day with their very own failed attack?

Edited November 6, 2012 by Anodyne

[at0m]

so you like religious nutcases (Catholic in this case) who use explosives to overthrow other religions/states that don't follow their faith?

 

Don't forget how Time Warner gets paid every time anon buys a Guy Fawkes mask!

[Mr. Bowser]

Anyone can post a 'take down facebook' op on the anon website or their irc channels... doesn't mean there's significant backing of hackers serious about the op though

[Stillman]

Nabraxas he was a first in a long proud tradition of mad Catholic bombers and the Islamist take all the Headlines it just isn't fair? *

* read sarcastically please lol.

[Bert&Ernie]

Nope

[Foo]

I think the idea of blowing up your governtment is captivating enough to forget the movites.

As Bowser said, anyone can post these "ops" but the soldiers are you. The marstercard visa ops had some effect because there were enough keyboard warriors who cared about the cause. Taking down facebook because its the 5th of November? Doesnt really inspire me and i assume the same for most.

[goneski]

Zynga / Facebook? Lawl..

Good to see script kiddies have their priorities straight.

[nabraxas]

I think the idea of blowing up your government is captivating enough to forget the motives.

not if the blowers up plan to replace government w/papal authority or a caliphate.