Mydoom Swamps Website

The Mydoom computer virus caused 250,000 computers worldwide to bombard SCO Group Inc.’s website in the largest-ever such electronic attack.

SCO Group, which is in a legal fight for control of the Unix operating system, shut down its site after the attack began at 11 p.m. Saturday, said Blake Stowell, a spokesman for the Lyndon, Utah-based company.

Mydoom spreads an e-mail attachment that makes computers send waves of requests to specified websites. A second strain, dubbed Mydoom.B, is programmed to attack the site of Microsoft Corp., whose products run on about 95% of personal computers, Tuesday.

“We’ve never seen an attack with this many computers participating,” said Mikko Hypponen, director of virus research at F-Secure Oyj in Helsinki, Finland. “This kind of army of infected computers could accomplish far greater attacks than just bringing down a website.”

SCO took down its website to prevent the attack from hurting its Internet service provider and slowing the Internet, Stowell said. Rather than set up an alternative website, SCO decided to wait until Monday.

“If we had directed people to a new site on Thursday, by Sunday the virus writers would have shifted their attack to that site,” Stowell said.