A group of computer hackers called New World Hackers have claimed responsibility for a cyberattack that took place on BBC’s online services last Thursday.
The group claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that flooded the BBC’s systems with 600 gigabits of messages per second.
A DDoS attack targets sites by bombarding servers with messages from multiple systems so that they are unable to respond to legitimate traffic.
The BBC’s online services, which include the news website, iPlayer catch-up TV platform, and iPlayer Radio app were affected by the attack for a few hours.
New World Hackers claims that they want to target Islamic extremist ISIS, and the attack on BBC was to test their own capability.
BBC‘s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones received a message from New World Hackers saying: "It was only a test; we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours.
BBC’s business correspondent Joe Lynam told BBC Breakfast: "Their ultimate goal, believe it or not, is not to attack the BBC but to go for Isis, the group which often calls itself Islamic State, and all their servers so they cannot spread propaganda from various different websites.
"What this group does is to take down various different websites it believes to be criminal and leading to terrorist acts."
Last year BBC iPlayer and many of its associated sites were offline for almost an entire weekend due to issues related to database.
