[Editor’s note: The following is a press release received
this morning from The SCO Group.]
SCO today confirmed that on Friday, May 2, 2003 at approximately
10:00 a.m. Mountain Time, it was victimized by a large scale,
coordinated Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The attack consumed
about 90 percent of the available bandwidth of SCO’s service
provider for the entire Lindon, Utah backbone.
A special agent for Intrusion Detection at the FBI Cyber Crimes
Division in Salt Lake City was contacted and is now analyzing full
information on the attacks. Personnel at the U.S. Attorney’s office
are proceeding with an investigation into the attack.
It appears that the perpetrator(s) placed a BOT or Worm on a
compromised machine, which was able to load this worm onto hundreds
of other machines, which then triggered attacks at the same
time.
The ISP has identified 138 different machines as the
intermediate source, but has not yet confirmed the identity of the
original source. The ISP characterized this as “the second largest
DoS attack” they have ever encountered.
“SCO is vigorously investigating the source of the attack and
the identity of the perpetrators,” said company spokesperson, Blake
Stowell. “This attack came within 48 hours of IBM’s response to
SCO’s lawsuit against IBM alleging intellectual property
infringement. Given this close proximity in time we are carefully
examining whether a link exists between SCO’s legal action and some
of the Linux community who are hostile toward SCO for asserting its
legal rights.”
“A denial of service attack is a serious criminal violation.
Cyber terrorism hurts a business as much as any other crime
involving destruction of property. Unfortunately, some programmers
who disagree with SCO’s corporate policies have ignored the
seriousness of cyber terrorism. This was a mistake on the part of
the people involved, because we will prosecute them to the fullest
extent of the law and will do everything possible to assure that
justice is done for the commission of this crime,” said
Stowell.
Related Story:
CNET
News: Net Attack Crushes SCO Web Site(May 03, 2003)