Microsoft puts bounty on Conficker creator

Microsoft has upped the ante in the attack on the Conficker worm by offering a US$250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Conficker's creators.

The software vendor said it was also working with security researchers, domain name registrars and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to try to take down the servers that have been launching the Conficker attacks. ICANN is the non-profit corporation that oversees Internet addresses.

"The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and domain name system communities working together," said Greg Rattray, ICANN chief Internet security adviser. "ICANN represents a community that's all about coordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the Internet globally secure and stable."

Conficker, also known as the Downadup worm, takes advantage of a critical bug in Windows, which was patched last October. Since late December the worm has emerged as one of the worst computer threats in years, infecting more than 10 million computer systems worldwide, including PCs within the British and French militaries.

If Conficker's author lives in a part of the world that's known to be soft on cybercrime - Russia, the Ukraine or Romania, for example - it may be hard to get a conviction, said the editor of the Hostexploit cybercrime research site, who goes by the pseudonym Jart Armin.

On the other hand, the $250,000 reward may be an incentive to hackers who may know who's responsible. Typically, hackers get paid about $10,000 by organised crime groups for writing an attack that reliably works on a significant number of computers, Armin said.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has offered such a bounty. In 2005, it paid $250,000 to two people for identifying Sven Jaschan, the teenager who wrote the Sasser worm.