Group says BBC website hack was a test for attack on ISIS

LONDON — A group called New World Hacking has claimed responsibility for an attack that brought down the BBC's website for several hours on Thursday.

The group says it goes after Islamic State (ISIS) online activity, but carried out the BBC attack to test its capabilities. A BBC source said it was a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack, in which a target is bombarded with traffic from multiple sources to try and overwhelm it.

SEE ALSO: The BBC website was attacked and the Internet thought the world had ended

"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, according to the BBC.

REMEMBER.. Only a DDoS attack test..
ISIS will be our main target. #BinarySec
https://t.co/tNizF8aTDl

— New World News (@NewWorldHacking) January 2, 2016

The BBC corporation said it won't be commenting on the group's claim. It wouldn't confirm or deny that the reason for the website being down Thursday was a DDOS attack.

In a message to BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, New World Hacking said: "We realize 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 BBC is because we wanted to see our actual server power."

Didn't know our attack made the news
https://t.co/uBwa0vdUAD | #Offline | 600 GBps |
https://t.co/Bo3TO4Xga3

@BBC @AboutTheBBC @BBCBreaking

— New World News (@NewWorldHacking) December 31, 2015

Users trying to access the BBC website, including news, radio and iPlayer, on the morning of New Year's Eve were greeted with "Error 500" messages.

The freaky clown error message.

IMAGE: BBC

The problems persisted from 7:00 a.m GMT to 10:30 a.m. GMT.

Mashable