A group of anti-Daesh hackers has claimed responsibility for the recent cyber-attack on the BBC’s website. The attack took down the BBC website for a few hours on the New Year’s Eve.

The group, calling itself New World Hacking (NWH), said it bombarded the system with 600 gigabits a second of messages. According to the BBC’s business correspondent, Joe Lynam the technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, had received a tweet from NWH, claiming responsibility for the attack.

“Their ultimate goal, believe it or not, is not to attack the BBC but to go for ISIS (Daesh), the group which often calls itself Islamic State, and all their servers so they cannot spread propaganda from various different websites…”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,” Lynam was quoted as saying by the British media.

‘Only a test’

NWH said the cyber-attack was a “test of its capabilities”.

“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,” the hackers noted in their message.

“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?” NWH added.

All the BBC’s websites were unavailable for a few hours on Thursday. The BBC is yet to confirm that a cyber-attack caused the problems.