Boston.com / Business / Technology / Mydoom software worm knocks out SCO website:
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff
Computer users and security experts had nearly a week's warning to prepare for the impact of the Mydoom software worm. It wasn't enough.
The worm, which swept across the Internet last week, delivered its payoff yesterday. Infected machines launched an attack that shut down the website of SCO Group Inc., a Utah software company that has drawn the ire of Linux advocates for its dispute with IBM Corp. over the free operating system.
An official of US-CERT, the federal Computer Emergency Readiness Team, said the Mydoom attack was little more than a minor nuisance for the Internet as a whole, and a SCO spokesman said it would have little effect on the company's ability to do business.
But the incident nonetheless demonstrated that the world's top Internet security experts still don't know how to prevent such attacks.
'In future designs of the network, we need to take account of these kinds of attacks and put things in place to help deal with the effects,' said US-CERT analyst Richard Pethia."
