Anti-ISIS Hacking Group Claims Responsibility For BBC Attack

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A US-based group of hackers calling itself New World Hacking has claimed responsibility for an attack on the British news service BBC's website on New Year's Eve, which shut down the site for around four hours.

The group sent a series of Twitter messages to the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones claiming that the attack was indeed carried out by their members as test to see the strength of its servers.

The BBC initially attributed the downing of the site to a technical issue, with visitors to a range of BBC websites and its iPlayer and iPlayer Radio services, but later called the issue a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

"We're aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now," the BBC tweeted at the start of the outage. "We'll update you as soon as we can."

A DDoS attack is an attempt to make a website unavailable to its intended users, temporarily or indefinitely interrupting or suspending services by flooding it with traffic.

During the outage, visitors to the site were greeted with an internal error page that told users that either the site was experiencing abnormal traffic to the network or the service, or the servers the site was hosted on were not currently available.

New World Hacking described itself to the BBC as a US-based organization that is working to take down Islamic State (ISIS) affiliated websites, as well as ISIS members.

"It was only a test, we didn't exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours. Our servers are quite strong," the group said in a message to the BBC. "The reason we really targeted [the] BBC is because we wanted to see our actual server power. We realize sometimes what we do is not always the right choice, but without cyber hackers ... who is there to fight off online terrorists?"

A press representative from the BBC told British newspaper The Independent that it could not confirm the source of the attack, despite the claim of responsibility from New World Hacking.

One of the group's members spoke with the BBC under the nickname Ownz, telling the news organization New World Hacking consists of 12 members and has been involved with efforts to identify ISIS members involved in the Paris attacks in November, as well as a campaign against the KKK.

In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Joe Lynam, the BBC's business correspondent, said the company could not verify NWH's involvement but called it "quite a serious claim," according to a report in The Guardian.

[Read why Microsoft is now alerting users to state-sponsored hacks.]

"We have to stress we have no evidence, but this group is claiming responsibility for this DDoS attack and they claim their ultimate goal is to take down Isis websites," Lynam was reported as saying. "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."

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