The MyDoom Internet worm that rapidly spread around the world last week has successfully downed the SCO Group Web site.
MyDoom and MyDoom.B were designed to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the SCO site from infected machines. After initially defending the site in the early stages of the attack yesterday, SCO later shut down the site entirely. MyDoom.B is also designed to attack the Microsoft Web site tomorrow.
Both companies have offered rewards of $250 000 for the arrest and conviction of the authors of MyDoom.
Ryan Price, CEO of Y3K Group, says the DDoS attack on SCO`s site is likely to be the biggest single DDoS attack ever. "We estimate the total number of infected computers to be over a million. As the attack started by MyDoom is a simple overload-of-the-Web site attack, it should have very little effect for the rest of the Net.
"This simply is an extreme case of 'slashdotting`, where a site gets sudden blast of traffic, which should bring a server down by overloading it. This will continue until 12 February, as the worm has been programmed to stop its operations then."
Jeff Carlon, worldwide director of IT infrastructure of the SCO Group, said in a statement: "While we expect this attack to continue throughout the next few weeks, we have a series of contingency plans to deal with this problem and we will begin communicating those plans on Monday morning."
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