Saturday, February 14, 2009

microsoft's $250,00 bounty for Conficker creator

MICROSOFT has organised a gloabal response to the CONFICKER(Dowadup) worm to diasble domains by Conficker. For the fifth time, microsoft announced a $250,000 bounty to find the source of the worm- a stratergy that's worked four times already and most recently led to the conviction of the author of the Sasser worm back in 2005.

Called a “reward program”, Microsoft said that the bounty is based on the firm’s “recognition” that launching the code into the wild was a “criminal attack”.Similar initiatives were announced in November 2003 to find the authors of the Blaster and Sobig worms, in January 2004 to find the author of MyDoom.B and the source of the Sasser worm in May 2004.

“The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and Domain Name System communities working together,” said Greg Rattray, chief Internet security advisor at ICANN. “ICANN represents a community that’s all about coordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the Internet globally secure and stable.”Along with Microsoft, organizations involved in this collaborative effort include ICANN, NeuStar, VeriSign, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International Inc., M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, researchers from Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks and Support Intelligence


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