News

Attackers Deface SCO Site with Microsoft Lawsuit Threat

• By Scott Bekker
• November 30, 2004

Attackers defaced the SCO Website at least twice in recent days -- in one case changing the company's logo to "We own all your code, pay us all your money," and in the other case claiming the company was preparing to sue Microsoft.

In the joke lawsuit, attackers changed the top of the page to "SCO vs World" and said SCO had found "parts of our code in almost all Microsoft software. We want to bring an action against Microsoft and our legal department is working on that."

The Website was fixed as of Tuesday.

SCO, with its unpopular and high-profile lawsuits claiming IP rights to large swaths of open source code, has been a frequent target of Internet attacks. According to Netcraft, an Internet services company that tracks the uptime of many Websites, the SCO site and related domains were offline for an extended period on Nov. 22.

SCO's worst outage came in February, when it was targeted by the authors of the MyDoom attack. That attack programmed several thousand computers to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.sco.com on Feb. 1. The site was offline for more than a month.

Any joking suggestion that SCO would sue Microsoft runs counter to the widespread belief in open source circles that Microsoft played a large role in SCO's anti-Linux spree of legal actions, which has served to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among corporate IT departments about their legal exposure related to open source software.