The SCO Group website is online again following a
denial-of-service attack which left it out of action for three
days.
The attack was perpetrated by a member of the-open source
community who was upset with SCO's escalating conflict with the
Linux community, according to open-source advocate Eric Raymond,
who said that he had been in contact with an associate of the
attacker.
Although Raymond said he did not know the attacker's exact
identity, he offered a few details. "He's one of us. He is part of
the community around open-source software and the internet
infrastructure and he's pretty senior."
Last weekend's attack was not the first DOS attack on sco.com.
In early May, the site was shut down for several hours.
SCO is working with the FBI to pursue charges against the author
of the May attack, and company executives have complained in the
past of being unfairly victimised by overzealous Linux fans.
Earlier this year, SCO sued IBM for more than $3bn, claiming
that IBM had inappropriately added code that was derived from SCO's
Unix System V software. SCO has also maintained that Unix code has
been directly and illegally copied into Linux, though the company
has yet to provide any compelling evidence to substantiate its
charges.
Last week, SCO chief executive officer Darl McBride complained
of being picketed, targeted with crank telephone calls at 2am, and
even challenged to a fist fight by a SCO detractor.
"Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see
a lot of that going on all the time - people trying to attack us or
people that we're associated with," he said at the time.
"If you look at a DOS attack, that's a form of cyber-terrorism
... When you're shutting people's websites down, you are impacting
commerce. That's against the law."
Raymond and fellow open-source advocate Bruce Perens condemned
the attack, saying that the open-source community would be better
off compiling evidence against SCO's claims, rather than attacking
SCO directly.
"I think it's important that we hold the moral high ground
here," said Perens. "We are the good guys. We are the ones who are
having false claims made about us."
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service