Fake BBC site disappears after bogus story on Charlie Hebdo

A fraudulent website that cloned the BBC has gone offline after it received a surge of traffic for running a bogus story concerning the violence at French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The website had a domain name similar to the legitimate one of the BBC, according to OpenDNS, which detected a spike of DNS (Domain Name System) requests to the website and wrote a blog post on Tuesday. DNS queries translate a domain name into an IP address that can be called into a browser.

The bogus site most recently carried a fake news story questioning the authenticity of footage of the fatal shooting of a Muslim police officer shortly after the attacks at the newspaper’s offices on Jan. 7.

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