An avalanche of data blocked access to the SCO Group’s Web site for several hours Friday, said the company, which has come under fire from Linux fans for an ongoing lawsuit against IBM. At 10:45 a.m. PDT, the Unix and Linux seller was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack that hampered its Internet operations, said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell. In a DDoS attack, numerous computers simultaneously send so much data across a network that the targeted system slows to a crawl trying to keep up with the traffic it’s receiving. Stowell said SCO had no indication who was behind the attack or why it was launched, but the Utah-based company has incurred the wrath of many Linux enthusiasts infuriated with its lawsuit against IBM. SCO seeks more than $1 billion in the suit, which accuses Big Blue of taking Unix intellectual property to which SCO owns rights, and moving it into open-source Linux. On Thursday, SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride said Unix source code had been copied line-by-line into Linux. Unofficial open-source spokesmen such as Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond have condemned the lawsuit as an act of desperation, and others in the Linux community have been less gentle in their scorn. A DDoS attack is hitting below the belt, though, Stowell said. “It’s one thing to have a complaint with SCO’s lawsuit or with our position in terms of code being found in Linux. It’s another thing to deal with that in an unprofessional way,” he said. Full Story
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