Activists who say their goal is to disrupt online propaganda by Islamic State have claimed responsibility for a cyber-attack on the BBC website.

The New Year’s Eve attack took down the iPlayer and other services for a few hours, according to Joe Lynam, the BBC’s business correspondent.



Lynam told BBC Breakfast that the technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, had received a tweet from a group calling itself New World Hacking (NWH), claiming responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS). It bombarded the system with 600 gigabits a second of messages.

Lynam said it was “quite a serious claim to make” but that the BBC could not verify their claims.

NWH claimed it targeted the BBC to test the power of its own servers.

Lynam said: “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. It posts the website which has been taken down with the hashtag ‘tangodown’ or ‘takendown’ deliberately by a distributed denial of service (DDoS), which is what hit the BBC two days ago.

“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.”

Cellan-Jones tweeted a message he received from NWH on the DDoS which said: “We are based in the US, but we strive to take down Isis [IS] affiliated websites, also Isis members.

“We realise sometimes what we do is not always the right choice, but without cyber hackers … who is there to fight off online terrorists?

“The reason we really targeted [the] BBC is because we wanted to see our actual server power. It was only a test, we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours.”

