Anti-IS group ‘New World Hackers’ claims BBC website attack

A group of hackers named “New World Hackers” claims the DDoS attack on BBC’s website. They launched it to test their attack capabilities.

On December 31th, the BBC website and iPlayer service went down due to a major “distributed denial of service” attack.”

The attack started at 0700 GMT and paralyzed the websites for more than hour causing the panic among users on the social media.

The technology correspondent at the British Broadcasting Company, Rory Cellan-Jones, confirmed that the issue was caused by an external attack and not by a glitch.

“Sources – BBC suffered a DdOS – a distributed denial of service attack. But services are now being restored” Tweeted Rory Cellan-Jones.

Anyway, the company hasn’t confirmed or denied the news of a DDoS attack against its systems.

Who is behind the attack?

Broadcasting companies like the BBC are a privileged target for cyber criminals, hackers, nation-state actors and terrorists. This is a difficult period so when users saw the error message displayed on the BBC websites their first thought was for the ISIS.

However, members of the IS did not have claimed the attack, instead, a group of Anti-ISIS hackers calling itself New World Hacking has claimed the responsibility for the BBC attack.

According to a post published by the BBC, Hackers of the New World Hacking said they had launched the attack as a “test of its capabilities”.

The Hackers of the New World Hacking group contacted the Rory Cellan-Jones via Twitter, below an image caption of the messages he received.

In a tweet to Rory Cellan-Jones, the New World Hacking group said they are based in US and they use their abilities to target Isis [IS] affiliated websites.

“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.”

Earlier, New World Hacking had said: “It was only a test, we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours. Our servers are quite strong.”

Stay Tuned!

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – BBC, DDoS attack)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.