The SCO Group's website has been knocked out of service
by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
The attack began at 11:20am GMT yesterday, shutting down the
company's main www.sco.com
website, according to company spokesman Blake Stowell. SCO is
working on restoring service to the company's website.
The attack was caused by a distributed "syn attack" involving
thousands of servers, which overloaded SCO's website.
In addition to the www.sco.com
and www.caldera.com websites,
the company's e-mail, intranet and customer support operations were
also affected.
SCO has raised the ire of the open-source community by claiming
that the Linux operating system contains software that violates
SCO's intellectual property.
The company has warned Linux users not to run the operating
system without first purchasing a licence from SCO, and is on the
verge of suing a major Linux user.
The company's website was hit by a DoS attack in May, two months
after it launched a lawsuit against IBM for allegedly
misappropriating SCO's Unix source code and contributing it to
Linux. A second DoS attack occurred in August, when SCO's site was
disabled for a number of days.
The August attack was perpetrated by a "senior" member of the
open-source community, according to open-source advocate Eric
Raymond.
"The open-source community has condemned crack attacks on SCO in
the past, and I don't believe any of our people are involved in
this alleged attack," he said. "No point to it; SCO's case is
sinking fast."
SCO does not know the identity of the attacker or why the attack
was launched.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service