MyDoom More Bad News for SCO

The rapidly spreading MyDoom worm (a k a Novarg.A by Symantec Corp. and MiMail.R by Trend Micro Inc.) is poised to perform a denial of service (DOS) attack against The SCO Group Inc.s Web site (www.sco.com).

The new worm has many of the standard malware worm behaviors of recent attacks in addition to the DOS attack, and this is not the only recent DOS attack against SCOs Web site. As is shown by performance monitoring of access to the Web site by the British security analysis firm Netcraft Ltd., the recent performance problems at the site may or may not be related to the worm, and we had no trouble getting to the site. MyDoom also opens TCP ports in the range of 3127 to 3198 to create an open proxy server for remote access by attackers.

Read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols column, "With Friends Like These, Linux Doesnt Need Enemies."

Symantecs analysis of the worm says it "can perform a Denial of Service against www.sco.com using a direct connection to port 80. Creates 64 threads which send GET requests. The DoS is active between February 1, 2004 and February 12, 2004." This indicates that the sporadic attacks so far are indicative of clock errors in some systems, and the real attack is set to begin Sunday.

Unless a defense is in place by then, the attack could be significant. According to Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at iDefense Inc., "MyDoom is spreading at a very high rate, reminiscent of SoBig.F in August of 2003. MyDoom is going to be one of the more notable worms for all of 2004."

SCOs recent legal actions have made many enemies in the open-source community and other areas. The company has come under significant verbal attack, in addition to technical attacks such as this one.