SCO sidesteps MyDoom, shifts site

The SCO Group has shifted the contents of its website to a new URL in an attempt to head off the effects of the MyDoom worm.

MyDoom – which was released last week – launched a distributed denial of service attack which SCO said took down www.sco.com on 1 February. The attack is expected to continue until 12 February. In response, SCO moved all the information from the attacked page to a new URL, www.thescogroup.com, and is asking its customers, resellers, developers, shareholders and other visitors to use the new URL until the attack ends. Some industry participants have suggested that SCO removed the sco.com website before the attacks occurred, possibly to pre-empt the surge in traffic.

"The sco.com website is largely there as an information repository, it's a point of access for software patches and the like," Kieran O'Shaughnessy, head of SCO Australia and New Zealand said. He said the attack would not affect SCO's business, and that it "has nuisance value, but nothing more."

"Increased traffic has already begun hitting www.sco.com in the last couple of days," said Jeff Carlon, director of worldwide IT infrastructure, The SCO Group. "We expect hundreds of thousands of attacks on www.sco.com because of these viruses. Starting on 1 February and running through 12 February, SCO has developed layers of contingency plans to communicate with our valued customers, resellers, developers, partners and shareholders. The first step of that plan is the implementation of www.thescogroup.com."

SCO is working with US law enforcement authorities to attempt to discover the identity of the creators of the MyDoom virus, and has offered a reward of up to US$250,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of individuals involved with the creation of the virus. Microsoft has offered a further $250,000.

"We believe that Microsoft's $250,000 reward in addition to the $250,000 reward offered by SCO will significantly assist the FBI in obtaining serious leads that may help catch the perpetrators of this virus," said SCO CEO, Darl McBride.

SCO raised the ire of the Linux community in March 2003 when it sued IBM over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that Unix code proprietary to SCO had found its way into Linux. SCO is now offering licenses for users of Linux to ensure they do not infringe SCO's copyright, but open source advocates have derided the evidence SCO put forward to support its claim and are advising customers to ignore the licence.

O'Shaughnessy admitted SCO Australian and New Zealand had not sold any licences, but said it was "very early days in the process", and SCO had "certainly had interest".

At least one Linux organisation and one company which uses open source has written to SCO threatening to report the company to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission unless the software maker provided evidence of its claims of copyright infringement. SCO has refused to do so, and O'Shaughnessy declined to comment on the matter.

James Pearce writes for ZDNet Australia