SCO website attacked again

The SCO Group's website, which suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack last weekend, has been down for several hours again today.

SCO, in the news for its decision to sue IBM for $3bn for breach of contract after claims that Big Blue submitted its Unix code into Linux, appears to have become a target for disgruntled open source advocates.

The firm's website was largely out of use last weekend and has operated only intermittently all this week. SCO has now confiirmed that it believes it to be under attack again.

The company said it has contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigations over the disruption to its business.

In a statement it said: "SCO believes these attacks are being perpetrated by individuals who have a disregard for the law and who hide behind attacks while trying to hurt SCO's business."

In a distributed DoS attack, a series of computers send large amounts of data to the target system at the same time. This ultimately brings down the site because it cannot cope with servicing the network traffic.

SCO has made many enemies and received blanket opposition from the open source community since launching its lawsuit against IBM.

It then introduced a chargeable licence to Linux operating system users, and has attempted to discredit the GNU General Public Licence under which Linux is distributed.

But in a show of defiance SCO said:"These attacks will not prevent SCO from continuing its strong Unix business and will only serve to strengthen SCO's resolve to protect our intellectual property."