Crackers cut off SCO website in DoS attack
This weekend, a denial-of-service attack took down the Web site of The SCO Group, which is caught in an increasingly acrimonious row with the open-source community over the company's legal campaign against Linux.
SCO's Web site was largely out of commission until Monday morning, a representative of the Lindon, Utah-based Unix and Linux seller said Monday. Performance measurement statistics from Netcraft indicated that the site had been down since Friday night.
In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, numerous computers simultaneously send so much data across a network that the targeted system slows to a crawl while trying to keep up with the traffic it's receiving. The SCO representative could not say where this weekend's strike originated.
However, unofficial open-source spokesman Eric Raymond suggested in a posting Sunday to open-source news Web site NewsForge that the attack was launched by someone angry at comments from SCO executives criticizing the open-source community's role in the legal battles over Linux.
Uh oh, got the wrong people mad at them. Not that I advocate DoS attacks, but someone wanted to get even with SCO somehow. Doing a DoS attack is not the best way to do that.