Microsoft Offers Reward For Worm Authors

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Washington Post
Microsoft Offers Reward For Worm Authors
By Brian Krebs
Thursday, January 29, 2004; 6:33 PM

Microsoft Corp. today pledged a $250,000 reward for information leading to 
the arrest and conviction of the author of a newly emerged e-mail worm that 
directs infected computers to attack the Microsoft Web site and prevents 
them from gaining access to anti-virus Web sites.

The Microsoft reward will draw from a $5 million fund that the company 
established in hopes of luring people to come forward with information that 
could lead to the arrest and conviction of the authors of viruses, worms 
and other online threats. Microsoft first announced the program in November 
in a joint press conference with the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and Interpol.

FBI officials did not return telephone calls seeking comment on the latest 
reward offer. An FBI spokesman said yesterday that there is an 
investigation into the origins of the MyDoom worms.

MyDoom.B is the second version of the MyDoom worm that appeared on the 
Internet on Monday. The first worm, which came inside an e-mail attachment, 
spread quickly across the Internet until it was responsible for as many as 
one in nine e-mail messages sent on Tuesday.

Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said that the company chose to focus its 
reward on MyDoom.B because it sees it as a more serious threat.

"We decided that Mydoom.B was most egregious not because it attacked 
Microsoft but because it prevented users from reaching the very Web sites 
that would protect them from this," he said.

The worm prevents victims from getting on Microsoft's Windows Update page, 
which hosts the company's latest software fixes and patches, as well as 
more than 60 other sites that contain anti-virus software. It also blocks 
Web site advertisements that are provided by Internet ad firm DoubleClick Inc.

MyDoom is expected to attempt a denial-of-service attack against SCO's Web 
site on Feb. 1. MyDoom.B is supposed to launch the same attack against the 
Microsoft Web site on Feb. 3.

Earlier this week, The SCO Group offered a $250,000 reward for the authors 
of the first version of MyDoom, which specifically targeted SCO's Web site. 
SCO, a Utah-based software developer, claims ownership over portions of the 
Linux open-source operating system. The company is pursuing legal action 
against IBM Corp. and other companies, asserting that Linux includes 
portions of the Unix operating system over which it claims copyright 
ownership. The open-source community disputes SCO's claims.

Microsoft already has rewards out for the capture of the authors of the 
destructive "Sobig" and "Blaster" worms, a pair of Internet bugs that 
surfaced in August and infected hundreds of thousands of computers running 
versions of the Windows operating system.

Federal law enforcement officials have arrested three individuals thought 
to be responsible for launching variants of the Blaster worm, but the 
author of the original and most destructive version of the worm remains at 
large. There have been no arrests in connection with any of the six Sobig 
variants released since January 2003.

The Microsoft reward announcement comes a day after the Department of 
Homeland Security debuted an online network to alert the nation to Internet 
threats against computer systems. 

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