Attack Fells SCO's Web Site

SCO Group Inc., which has been the target of intense criticism by open-source groups angry over the company's legal challenge of Linux, was struck Wednesday by a large-scale denial-of-service attack that brought down the software maker's Web site.

No suspects have been identified in the Internet-based assault that began at 4:20 a.m. MST. The company's Web site remained unavailable into Thursday morning.

Besides its Web site, the attack brought down the SCO's E-mail system, corporate intranet, and customer-support operations, the company said.

"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," a company spokesman said in a statement. "We deplore these activities by those who try to intimidate or harass legitimate businesses through cyberterrorist tactics while hiding their true identity."

The specific type of distributed denial-of-service attack, called a "syn attack," was caused by someone commandeering several thousand servers and having them overload SCO's site with illegitimate Web site requests. The flood of traffic caused the company's Internet bandwidth to be consumed, making the site inaccessible to legitimate visitors.

SCO, which claims to hold the copyright to the Unix operating system, has filed a $3 billion lawsuit against IBM, claiming the company violated its license with SCO by inserting some of its copyrighted code into Linux, the open-source operating system. SCO also has threatened legal action against companies refusing to pay royalties for the use of Linux, and has challenged in court the legality of the general public license governing the use of Linux.