SCO denial of service attack ends

The SCO Group's website and file servers are back online, after being hit by a denial of service attack that cut off access for almost two days.

The outage was over by 5 pm PST on Thursday, according to the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). The attack, which began flooding SCO's network with data early Wednesday morning, targeted the company's website first, then moved to hobble its file servers and mail servers.

The inundation of data has largely stopped, said Blake Stowell, a director of corporate communications for SCO, which has come under criticism for a legal campaign centered on Linux.

"According to our internet service provider, there have been little spikes here and there. But they are nothing compared to what we have experienced over the last few days," Stowell said.

A group of researchers at CAIDA found that SCO's servers had responded to more than 700 million requests in less than 32 hours. The requests took up computing resources and consumed internet bandwidth as part of the denial-of-service attempt.

"The current attack successfully blocked access to SCO web and FTP servers," the CAIDA researchers said in their analysis.

The attack was the third blow to SCO in the past three weeks: news of the attack appeared five days after the company lost a key tactical battle in its court case against IBM and delayed its earnings announcement.

The company has attracted the ire of the open source community for its pursuit of a legal case that, if successful, would essentially give SCO rights to important parts of the Linux source code.

Most Linux users don't seem to be taking SCO's claims seriously, however, and the case shows little sign of slowing the growth of the operating system. A recent report published by market researcher IDC found that sales of Linux servers grew almost 50 per cent in the third quarter of 2003, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Robert Lemos writes for CNET News.com