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Several BBC websites have been the victim of a large cyber attack recently. The broadcaster initially indicated that the problem was a “technical issue,” but it has since come forward to say that the attack was instead a DDoS, or a distributed denial of service attack. BBC has not said who they believe to be responsible for the harassment.
The intent of a DDoS attack is to send more traffic to a site than it can handle, resulting in the site’s going offline. As a result of this attack, BBC’s main sites as well as some of its smaller ones, including the iPlayer radio app and its catch-up service, were unavailable. Multi-language services like BBC Hindi and BBC Urdu were also down.
Many people took to social media to express their discontent, a move, a response that Doctor Who voice actor Barnaby Edwards particularly enjoyed: “Delighted to see the entirety of Twitter making a fuss over the BBC website crashing,” Edwards tweeted. “It shows how important the BBC is to so many people.”
Three hours or so after the sites first failed BBC acknowledged the problem on Twitter, where it first referred to the issue as a technical failing.
The BBC has experienced several attacks like this before, and as the site receives millions of visitors every day, it occasionally goes down. Professor Tim Watson, Director of Cyber Security at the University of Warwick, says, “The BBC site will expect lots of traffic and they are a high-profile target so you would expect them to have all kinds of protection against a DDoS attack.”
Watson offers a number of ways for large corporations to better protect themselves against cyber security risks. He recommends “fat pipes,” or large data cables that are better able to handle large amounts of traffic, like the kind that the BBC sees every day, as well as fast computers with the ability to sense and respond quickly to potential DDoS attacks.
The sites have all been restored, and much of the panic–some real, mostly humorous–on Twitter has died down.