(May 6, 2003) - SCO has confirmed that on Friday morning, May 2, 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 is now analyzing the attacks. The U.S. Attorney's office is also proceeding with an investigation.

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 SCO 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.