A “sophisticated cyber-attack” on the BBC has been linked to Iran’s efforts to disrupt the BBC Persian Service.

In a speech Director General Mark Thompson plans to say that the internet attack coincided with efforts to jam two of the service’s satellite feeds into Iran.

He will say: “We regard the coincidence of these different attacks as self-evidently suspicious.”

Last month Mr Thompson accused Iran of intimidating Persian service workers.

Reporters Without Borders has also complained about Iran’s “cyber-army”.

The latest revelation follows a blog post by Mr Thompson in February in which he complained of the “repeated jamming of international TV stations such as BBC Persian TV, preventing the Iranian people from accessing a vital source of free information”.

In his speech to the Royal Television Society he will note that on the day of the cyber-attack there had also been an attempt to disrupt the Persian Service’s London phone-lines by the use of multiple automatic calls.

“I don’t want to go into any more detail about these incidents except to say that we are taking every step we can, as we always do, to ensure that this vital service continues to reach the people who need it,” Mr Thompson will say.

Some parts of the BBC were unable to access email and other internet services on 1 March. It is understood that the attack may have been caused by its systems being overwhelmed by a flood of external communication requests – a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack.

However, a BBC spokeswoman was unable to provide detail about the incident.

“I’m afraid we can’t comment any further on the details of the attacks than what’s in the extract [of the speech],” a she said.

Cyber-censors

The revelations follow Reporters Without Borders “Enemies of the Internet” report which was released at the start of the week.

The free-speech lobby group reported that Iran and some of the other countries on its register “censor internet access so effectively that they restrict their populations to local intranets that bear no resemblance to the world wide web.”

It added that Iran’s authorities were now capable of blocking ports used by virtual private networks designed to bypass the restrictions.

It also reported that at times of unrest the state had slowed internet connections speeds to make it impossible to send or receive photos or videos.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard created a “cyber army” in 2010. Hundreds of net users have been arrested and some even sentenced to death.

Earlier this month the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also ordered officials to create The Supreme Council of Virtual Space – a body tasked with defining policy and co-ordinating decisions regarding the net.

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to a request for comment.

According to the companies this new platform will let various phone functions such as messaging, calling and also browsing to be created as the HTML5 apps as well as operate in an environment which is Firefox browser based, reported PC World.

Developers have aready started using the HTML5 for mobile apps, and the advantage behind using web technology in the creation of apps allows for them to look and feel like native apps apps, however, they can be more easily ported to more than a number of mobile phone platforms.

Meanwhile, Mozilla as well as Telefónica has plans for enabling HTML5 applications to access different core phone APIs.

Director of product development and innovation at Telefónica Digital, Carlos Domingo, stated that, “With new open Web devices we will be able to offer a smartphone experience at the right price point for these customers.”

Researchers have accused Google of gaming the methodology and timing of a recent report into browser security, funded by the company, which ranked Firefox bottom of the pile.

Security researchers at NSS Labs have claimed that the methodologies used in the investigation by Accuvant, which was funded by Google and included the company’s own Chrome browser, were flawed and painted a dark and inaccurate image of Firefox’s browser security.

Accusing the company of ignoring important security features in Firefox and other browsers, including frame poisoning in Firefox, the report, entitled “The Browser Wars Just Got Ugly,” asks some difficult questions of the investigative party and Google’s part in the report.

“The JIT hardening analysis failed to give ample credit to the more proactive technologies employed by IE9, which happened to not be present in Chrome,” NSS claims.

“Accuvant disabled highly relevant portions of non-Google browsers’ protection without noting the impact on the overall results,” the researchers add. “This error in testing resulted in an erroneously negative assessment of the browsers’ protection capabilities, since some browsers will only block malware during or after download and before execution.

By utilising malware sites garnered exclusively from free public lists, the malware sample set was highly skewed in Google’s favor. Justifying not using high-quality, professional malware feeds because Microsoft and/or Google may or may not subscribe to them is highly suspect.”

NSS also claimed that the timing of the report was suspicious, being released as Google refused to renew its traditional agreement with Firefox creator The Mozilla Foundation, which makes Google the default search provider in Firefox in exchange for advertising revenue that makes up more than 80 per cent of the Foundation’s overall income.

Speaking to Computerworld, NSS chief technology officer Vikram Phatak explained: “This is a vendor-funded paper, and in these cases the vendor is going to drive the methodology, which appears to be the case here.”

Google has not responded to a request for comment on NSS’s claims.