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The SCO Group Inc. claims that its Web site was the target of a distributed denial-of-service attack that made the site inaccessible for much of the day Wednesday. In addition to black-holing the site, SCO claims that the companys intranet, mail servers and customer support systems also were affected.
SCO has been the target of several similar attacks in recent months, most of which are thought to be the result of the companys involvement in controversial legal battles with IBM and the Linux community over ownership of some of the Linux source code.
SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, said in its statement that the attack was a SYN flood. In this type of DDoS attack, a large number of attacker-controlled machines are programmed to send flurries of TCP SYN packets to the target Web server, which eventually becomes overwhelmed by the traffic and stops accepting incoming connection requests. SYN floods are among the most common DDoS attacks.
“SCO is working with law enforcement officials and gathering information through mechanisms that we have in place to help us identify the origin of these attacks,” said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell in a statement. “We deplore these activities by those who try to intimidate or harass legitimate businesses through cyber terrorist tactics while hiding their true identity.”
SCO said the attack began at 4:20 a.m. MST Wednesday. As of 5:30 p.m. EST, the companys site was still inaccessible.
SCO is involved in a protracted legal battle against IBM and also intends to use the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to sue some corporate Linux users, announcing last month that it plans to start suing enterprise Linux users within 90 days for copyright infringement.