London: A group of hackers who say they target the online activity linked to the Islamic State (IS) group has claimed the New Year Eve cyber attacks, that brought down the BBC’s network of websites, as a “test of its capabilities”. All the BBC’s websites were unavailable for several hours on Thursday after what a BBC source described as a distributed denial of service (DdoS) attack.
A DdoS attack is an attempt to force an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. The BBC has not confirmed or denied such an attack caused the problems.