Group Claiming to Oppose ISIS Says It Committed Cyberattack on BBC

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/world/europe/group-claiming-to-oppose-isis-says-it-committed-cyberattack-on-bbc.html

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LONDON — A group of computer hackers who say they want to disrupt the online activities of the Islamic State have claimed that they were behind a recent cyberattack on the British Broadcasting Corporation. They said the attack was intended as a test of their capabilities, according to messages sent to a BBC reporter Saturday.

“It was only a test, we didn’t exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours,” the group, New World Hackers, said in a message to the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, who posted the message on Twitter. “We realise sometimes what we do is not always the right choice, but without cyber hackers ... who is there to fight off online terrorists?”

BBC digital services were shut for a few hours on Thursday in what it said was a “distributed denial of service” attack.

Such attacks typically disrupt sites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they are overwhelmed.

A BBC spokeswoman said the broadcaster would not comment on the claim of responsibility.