At the end of last week the SCO Group, the industry's leading pariah, found itself in the ludicrous position of having to defend its contention that it was the subject of a crippling and expanding two-day Denial of Service attack for the third time since it sued IBM in March for putting SCO-owned IP in Linux and of having to muster expert opinion attesting to the attack to gainsay self-appointed experts who claimed either it wasn't or wasn't doing enough to defend itself.

SCO's critics were initially given space by Groklaw, the paralegal open source site that's got the knives out for SCO.

However, the Cooperating Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), which took exception to SCO calling it a SYN attack, still found that SCO's servers had been deluged by 700 million hits in less than 32 hours that blocked access to the company's Web and FTP servers.

Ditto Netcraft.

Despite these findings, the highly opinionated Good Morning Silicon Valley speculated that SCO used the attack to divert media attention away from the news that a Utah court awarded IBM a motion to compel discovery that it was after forcing SCO to detail its claims against both IBM and Linux and it had postponed its earnings until this coming Tuesday.

The zine claimed SCO went to "unusual lengths to publicize the attack," because SCO put out a press release saying it was under attack.

CAIDA, taking a page from the "let's-blame-the-victim" school of thought, seems to be of the opinion that SCO should have bought more bandwidth or gotten itself an ISP that has the technology to thwart such an avalanche attack. SCO is of the opinion it's already spending more than it would like on its defenses, according to Jeff Carlon, its director of IT infrastructure.

SCO calculates the attack cost it $300k in lost productivity since its people couldn't access or answer 33,000 e-mails and that was before the whole thing started up again Saturday at 3 am then ended Sunday at 11 p.m., then started up again on Monday. On Tuesday it was still going on.

Can't somebody's mother ground them and pull the plug on their computer?

• To Whom It May Concern
• SCO's "DDoS Attack" - Was It or Wasn't It?
• SCO to Detail its Case against Linux to IBM by Monday
• SCO & Microsoft Post Bounties of $250,000 Each on the Head of MyDoom Author