SCO Website Defaced Again
Author: Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Tuesday, 30 November 2004, 08:38 GMT
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Malicious hackers have once again compromised The SCO Group’s website, the second time in as many days. The messages on the website appear to mock the company’s ownership claims over various parts of the Linux operating system.
On Saturday, hackers compromised the site and inserted a banner image that reads "We own all your code. Pay us all your money." The image was removed on Monday morning in the U.S., but the incident followed a similar attack on Sunday.
SCO has openly acknowledged the attacks saying that its website site "experienced two intrusions by a malicious hacker that temporarily altered two web pages." Apparently hackers used a known vulnerability in the OS running the company’s webservers to make the attack – a vulnerability that SCO has said has since been patched said Blake Stowell, the company's public relations director.
Open Source website Newsforge.com on Sunday claimed that the SCO site was altered to say that the company would be making intellectual property claims against Microsoft Corp.'s software. That hack displayed the signature "hacked by realloc(," according to Newsforge.com. The same signature was displayed in the background of the altered banner image in Monday's attack.
SCO has been a target of several recent attacks, including Denial of Service and website defacement attacks, since it filed several high profile lawsuits against Linux vendors IBM and Novell early last year. Among other things, SCO claims that IBM violated SCO's copyright on Unix System V, which SCO purchased from Novell Inc., by copying elements of that operating system into Linux, which is distributed for free.
SCO’s legal claim to own parts of Linux, and its threats to enforce that its ownership through whatever means necessary have raised the ire of open source fanatics around the world. The company's legal actions are seen as a threat to the spread of Linux, which many consider a possible rival to the dominance of Microsoft's proprietary desktop and server operating systems. The lawsuits have prompted companies, including Novell and Hewlett-Packard Co., to offer customers protection against copyright infringement suits.
» SCO Under Attack… Again
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