"Syn attack" on SCO
LWN reports on a SCO press release complaining that they're being attacked. SCO's flaks say
This specific type of DDoS attack, called a "syn attack," took place when several thousand servers were compromised by an unknown person to overload SCO's Web site with illegitimate Web site requests. The flood of traffic by these illegitimate requests caused the company's ISP's Internet bandwidth to be consumed so the Web site was inaccessible to any other legitimate Web user.
Of course network attacks are no laughing matter. Well, not normally.
It sounds like they're talking about a syn flood attack, to judge from the slightly mangled name and description. SYN floods are a problem that was basically solved by SYN Cookies in Linux, BSD and other systems as much as seven years ago. I haven't heard of such an attack in years, because they don't really have much effect on a modern kernel. The fact that they were ever possible was really just a misdesign in early stacks. (Completely understandable and forgiveable of course; the internet used to be a more friendly place.)
I think it's pretty damn funny that even when SCO are trying to paint themselves as victims they're really just showing that they're seven years behind the times.
As Mozilla says, "cookies are a delicious treat". No cookies for SCO customers though.
posted Thu 11 Dec 2003 in /issues/sco-vs-linux | link
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