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SCO DOS'ed
Thomas Cort writes "BusinessWeek has an article about a DDoS attack against SCO.
"At 10:45 a.m., the Unix and Linux seller was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that hampered its Internet operations, said SCO spokesman Blake Stowell ... the Utah-based company has incurred the wrath of many Linux enthusiasts infuriated with its lawsuit against IBM ... SCO's Internet service provider, ViaWest, told SCO that about 100 high-speed T1 data-transmission lines of network capacity--about 90 percent of its total bandwidth--was being consumed in the attack.""
I'd hate to say this, but serves them right.
Sure SCO is being a prick about this law suit but to have a bunch of vengefull open source/Linux Crusaders attack thier systems just gives the whole opensource community a bad name. Just suck it up and let them sue, cause either we the open source community screwed up and used code we shouldn't have or SCO is blowing smoke and IBM will win the suit.
Gotta love the way the article puts this whole slant that it must be Linux fans doing it. The SCO guy just coming out and saying it's unprofessional for us linux boys to do this sort of thing, that just reeks dude. Reeks. Leeks. mmmm, hungry.
Like what I said? You might like my music
there are too many *legal* ways of showing to SCO our revolt with they 're dirty tactics without needing to play at they 're (very low) level
Just my two cnts
cheers from Portugal ...
Who said that a bunch of people were involved in the attack. The article said it was around 138 machines. An attack that small was could easily have been done and probably was by one person.
Despite the fact that I think SCO deserves it, I wonder if this will look good for open source. I mean I can see the FUD for this already.
"If you even make threats against the open source community they may just attack your systems. "
It wouldn't surprise me if SCO DOS'd themselves for more attention (or possibly DOS'd themselves by accident knowing those wankers), but I can see a possible bad spin.
Damnit. This sort of crap is exactly what we don't need! SCO's not pursuing this case because they expect to win, they're trying to get as much media attention as possible. The more bad press the OSS/Linux/GNU/hacker community gets, the stronger the need to shut SCO up becomes. They want to be bought out. Demostrating to the world that there are "evil hackers" out there with little respect for corporations and the law just adds fuel to a fire.
The drama the DDoS kiddies serves as a nice distraction that SCO has no case!
Mod me down, I really don't care at all. I am anti-linux and pro-BSD for no other reason than the fact that I can't stand the brutal attitude shown by a majority of linux users. In fact, I've influenced clients to go with BSD instead of linux for just that reason. Wanna hear a secret? I'm not the only one.
Let me guess: you don't care and I can go fuck myself. Doesn't break my heart -- I like to be proven right.
It'd take a specific trial to prove it. And I'd wager that SCO's complete and total lack of a desire to publish any of ITS IP will exlude them from being interpreted to enter a contract with it.
It'd be akin to writing up a contract for making a movie out of a Stephen King book for $5, placing said contract on the last few blank pages with the note "by signing the cover, author agrees to this agreement" then taking it to a book signing, having King sign it, and then using the book to argue that you had a contract to make the movie.
Conversely, anyone here feel like they're BEING TREATED unprofessionally? The article makes it look like SCO has jumped to the conclusion that it's Linux fans doing the attack. If that is true, then SCO is acting unprofessionally themselves. How many fingers are they pointing at us?
Well, just who the hell do you think it is doing it? IBM? It's the same people who always do this shit - stupid kids that think they're making some kind of political statement by breaking stuff. This time, instead of saying "you can't stop us from trading music", it's "how dare you try to fuck with Linux you assholes!!" Yeah. Really mature.
Getting your buddies together and pointing all your zombied machines at someone's IP address and going "bang" does NOT constitute legitimate protest. Even if you don't care about SCO, this is screwing their ISP bigtime - they're knocking out 90% of their bandwidth, for crissake. All it does is reinforce every negative stereotype of Linux/Open Source/GPL people held by the rest of the world.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
There is no evidence to suggest that the individuals who did this have anything to do with the FS/OSS GNU/Linux community, or were even fans of GNU/Linux.
There are many possibilities as to who did this, only one of which is a Linux-fan.
Could have been an angered ex-employee at SCO.
Could have been a renegade at IBM.
Could have been someone who doesn't like SCO for some other reason.
So, stop defaming the Linux community.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
But, what of the mob when the law is made of the rich, by the rich, for the rich?
Oh how sweet it is!!
Ok, so they are loaded down to 90%...
How about let's see that raised to 110% ???
And let it not stop until they relent.
This is not about defending IBM but about defending the FREE WORLD..
The DDOS'ers are freedom fighters..
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war !!!
They intentionally released (and continue to intentionally release) Linux distributions including GPLed kernel code containing the putative code that they're whining about. AFAICT, that's what counts in court. Whether they unintentionally shot themselves in the foot (or head) at the same time appears to be immaterial.
I can't see a way of propagating that far enough back to force UnixWare open - but I'd be laughing for days if it did happen, it'd be near as funny as Microsoft GPLing the Windows 2003 source code.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think that this DDOS attack is unfortunate, not because I have any love for SCO, but rather because it makes the Linux community look bad. Never mind that IBM has the biggest motive to attack SCO; most of the sort of people that use "cracker" and "hacker" simultaneously will just see Linux as juvenile computer criminals-are us.
This is not surprising, however, since SCO has made a giant ass of themselves.
At 1.5mbps thats 150 megs a second!
IRC efnet a year and a half ago crawled to its knees when a cracker hit it with just 20 megs a second.
I am supprised it came this quickly considering how many hosts or routers he had to crack to find his slaves. Something this huge requires great efforts. Also regular users are now waking up that a firewall and Windows updates are needed. 2 years ago everyone I knew used Outlook, Office, and Windows unpatched without a firewall using a highspeed connection. Today only a few still do this which makes finding hosts alot harder.
http://saveie6.com/
In fact, I've influenced clients to go with BSD instead of linux for just that reason.
Listen to yourself: You're advocating the use of an OS based on the who is using it.
I'll never understand this way of thinking.. A good product will always attact good and bad people in mass.. Let's just imagine for second that everyone listened to the BSD advocates, and switched to BSD. Where are you going to turn when the idiots follow again? Is there some section in the BSD license that makes it impossible for the kiddies to use it or something?
How are you going to prevent people you don't like from using something that is useful?
More imporantly, why do you even care who else uses your software? After all, it is your software.
I guess some people were just born to be bitter..
Why do I keep typing pythong?
When I started out writing software back around 1980, computers were just cool. Nobody really cared which OS you ran and we were as excited by the Amiga as we were by Atari, Apple, or whatever else computer. It never seemed to matter that much what OS they were running. Now it seems as bad as any religion. People seem to think that theirs is the only true way and everybody else is going to hell. So many seem to think that they have to convert everybody else to their OS religion or else destroy them. I'm so sickened by what the computer geek world has become.
I'm reading through these comments and I see so many who believe that snuffing somebody off the net via DDoS is good and justified. More disturbingly, I see so many other posts by people who say they don't agree with this tactic, but that SCO "deserves" it. Deserves it for what? For believing that they have intellectual property that's been stolen and wanting to protect it? For not agreeing with the Church of Open Source and asserting that they have a right to keep intellectual property to themselves?
People don't know what or how much SCO claims is stolen, but since their claim threatens the First United Assembly of Linux, they're considered evil and they must be destroyed by any means possible. It's not about right or wrong, it's about us vs. them, and that is so very wrong.
This "us vs. them" mentality seems strangely similar to the attitudes of terrorists who want to cleanse the world of infidels. Sure, the users aren't killing actual people (so far), but obviously some are willing to cut off the lifeline of an offending business. Isn't this just another, softer, form of terrorism?
Some of the posts on this thread even propose that SCO or IBM or Microsoft are behind this whole thing. Doesn't that seem at least glancingly similar to the supporters of religious terrorism proposing that the countries which are the target of attacks are perpetrating the attacks themselves? Is the community so desperate to believe that it's right that it will blind itself to the reality that perhaps some of its own members are taking things too far?
Are there any reasonable voices left? Is anyone willing to wait and see what and how much SCO claims was stolen before convicting them of some perceived crime against their Linux God? Or is this really how the world operates now? Do we just read the headlines, draw conclusions using vague information, then either join the mobs or stand by while the mobs torch them and say "well, they deserve it"? If they're vindicated in the end, will we just excuse ourselves by saying that they deserved it anyhow for all their other crimes against Linux?
It only plays into SCO's hands by doing DOS and other attacks against them. Those of you who are doing this are only proving to SCO and to the rest of the world that the Linux community is a bunch of hackers and script kiddies.
Yes, what they are doing is reprehensible and it should be stopped, but not like this.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Unquestionably.
I think the GPL penny really hasn't dropped at all for so many important companies. Only a few people within SUn seem to really `get it', for example, and on the other side of the coin there are countless PHBs convinced that if they let a GPLed program in the door, every shred of their own software immediately becomes public.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The amazingly stupid thing about this is:
1) it makes a clear case for increasing criminal penalties for interfering with comm services.
2) It doesn't hurt SCO. It may, however, bankrupt the small, independent ISP they chose to do business with.
3) Even if it did hurt SCO, who gets canned over it? The lawyers? Nope. The CEO? Nope. The first-level support guys who live paycheck-to-paycheck? Yep.
DDOS'ing a company is a stupid, childish, and completely counter-productive thing to do. It harms nobody but innocent bystanders. Cheering these idiots on is no different from cheering on any other vandal.
I hate to say it, but these recent events can be taken several different ways. Consider this: Even under a massive DDoS attack, their servers running SCO Unix are still functioning, quite well. I still get very quick responses when visiting their site. And nobody has succeeded at hacking/defacing it yet.
I would have expected a good DDoS attack to make them completely inaccessible, but when I go to their site I don't notice any difference.
Some time after midnight tonite, our network was hit with another large scale port 1434 DOS attack. The admin is concerned that there may be another new vulnerability in MS SQL Server. This attack saturated two T3s. People should be aware there may be another vulnerability in Microsoft OSes that is recently being exploited.
As much as I dislike SCO, I have to wonder if this was actually a *bad* move. Couldn't SCO try to work this into its case as some sort of 'FUD' to try to make it look like IBM was somehow responsible, or that Linux users -- who already "stole" their code -- are now attacking them?
I hate SCO. But I'd hate even more if SCO could somehow spin this to help their case.
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suwain_2