SCO site downed by MyDoom DoS attack

SCO site downed by MyDoom DoS attack

By Stuart Finlayson

Despite having imposed contingency plans to deal with the expected data barrage, The SCO Group could not prevent its website being put out of commission by the MyDoom virus.

Last Friday, company spokesman Blake Stowell said that people would see some creative thinking on the part of SCO as to how it would deal with this imminent problem. But for all the forward planning to deal with the virus, which was designed to force infected machines to send data to SCO's web server between February 1st and February 12th, SCO could not prevent its site from going down when the massive Denial of Service attack started over the weekend.

It is thought that SCO has been targeted for this attack as a reaction to its pursuit of the Linux community for compensation over what it claims is a breach of copyright of its Unix source code in the open source operating system. The dispute has led to court action between SCO and IBM, Novell and Red Hat, with enterprise Linux users having also been written to by SCO requesting that they purchase licenses from SCO to continue to use the open source OS.

SCO expects the DoS attack to continue until February 12th. The company has offered a US$250,000 bounty for information which leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the virus attack.

Meanwhile, a variant of the virus is expected to attack Microsoft's main website on Tuesday. As a result, the software giant has also offered a US$250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the orchestrator of the worm.

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