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How credible is the Anonymous threat to "destroy" and "kill" Facebook on Nov. 5? PCMag spoke with Sophos senior security adviser Chester Wisniewski Wednesday to get a read on whether the loosely organized hacking group could actually pull it off.

The first question Wisniewski had concerned whether the so-called Operation Facebook threat is actually coming from Anonymous itself.

"When you decide to become associated or affiliated with anyone who can decide that they don't want to disclose their identity, then I guess anyone can speak for the group. I could be Anonymous or you could be Anonymous," he said.

It's a point worth raising, because AnonOps, as close to a reliable mouthpiece as there is for goings-on within Anonymous writ large, initially distanced itself from Operation Facebook.

"We don't 'kill' the messenger. That's not our style," the @anonops Twitter feed tweeted early Wednesday morning. Indeed, AnonOps and the affiliated hacker group LulzSec have used social media to spread its PR message to great effect in recent months.

But AnonOps later tweeted that Operation Facebook was "is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it."

A more interesting question is whether Anonymous could possibly take down the social networking giant, even at full strength. And AnonOps may have had good reason to be wary of Operation Facebook, given that Anonymous has attempted such an ambitious operation before, according to Wisniewski.

"Theoretically, any website can be taken down, if you have a large enough group of people who want to take it down," he said. "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.'"

Anonymous had similarly dismal results in an attempted take-down of Amazon—and there's a reason for that. The language of the Operation Facebook announcement suggests a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack of the sort Anonymous and LulzSec have used to temporarily shut down websites belonging to the CIA, the U.K.'s Organized Crime Agency, and others.

But such blunt-force attacks, which basically bombard websites with so many external requests that they simply can't stay online, aren't likely to work on Facebook, Wisniewski said.

MORE: Is it even possible to DDoS a site with Facebook's scale and resources?