SCO took its site offline as a result of the MyDoom virus, which was programmed to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against sco.com from infected computers on February 1, 2004. The virus launched the attack as scheduled, overloading the site’s servers with requests and successfully bringing the site down. The virus writers programmed MyDoom to end on February 12, but additional variants of the virus continued the attack, and the company moved its site temporarily to thescogroup.com
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Netcraft said that since the site went back online, there has been only one brief outage.
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The MyDoom virus, considered to be the worst virus of all time, also spawned a second variant programmed to launch a DDoS attack against Microsoft’s corporate Web site. Reports indicated that Microsoft (microsoft.com) was affected, but the site was never taken offline.
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Both Microsoft and the SCO Group have adversarial relationships with the open source community.
