‘Anti-IS’ Hackers Tested Abilities On BBC Website

Three days ago we reported on the BBC’s web services being down, from their website to iPlayer, their on-demand streaming service. It has now00000000000000000000 come to light at that a group has claimed responsibility, stating that the attack was just to test their capabilities.

The group calls itself New World Hacking and in their message they claim that “it was only a test” and they then go on to state that “we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours. Our servers are quite strong”. The group claims it carried out the attack, a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS), a method which sees websites and servers knocked offline by swarming the system with more traffic than it can handle.

Claiming to be based in the US they stated in a tweet to BBC technology correspondentRory Cellan-Jones and were striving to “take down Isis-affiliated websites, also Isis members”.

A group member, calling himself Ownz, claimed that the team is formed of twelve people, eight male and four female, who started working together back in 2012 and have since taken part in operations against the Ku Klux Klan and #OpParis, both activities designed to track down, name and expose people who use the internet as a tool.

The group claims it will use the technique against IS websites and a new list of targets, associated with the group, from Tuesday.

Image courtesy of the BBC.