Microsoft Places $250K Bounty on 'Conficker' Author

[boomer]

LMAO 250K is nothing if they really wanted to know they offer some real Money

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341012,00.asp

Microsoft, several security firms, and members of the academic community came together Thursday to try and develop a coordinated plan to halt the spread of the Conficker worm, also known as Downadup.

Microsoft announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Conficker author or authors, available to anyone in any country, subject to local laws. Meanwhile, a group of security companies pledged to work together to disable domains targeted by Conficker.

Conficker's spread has been astonishing. The Houston, TX police department had to stop arresting some people because of a Conficker outbreak throughout municipal computer systems. And infections in French military computers were so bad that fighter planes were grounded.

[Jack]

Googling for Conficker clean-up information? Be careful



If you’re trawling the Web for information on disinfecting the Conficker worm,  be very, very careful.

Cyber-criminals are latching onto the hype around the Windows malware threat and have started registering domain names linked to Conficker and poisoning search results to trick users into installing fake anti-virus software programs.


According to this growing list maintained by the Conficker Working Group, at least one of the domains is actively serving malware.  F-Secure dug into one of the domains and found an a rogueware (fake anti-virus) campaign attempting to bilk users out of $39.95 for non-existent Conficker clean-up.

Yesterday, just hours after the release of enterprise scanning tools to help fingerprint the virulent worm, search results on Google were poisoned to serve malware for queries related to that news.   In one instance, the top Google result for “nmap conficker” was serving up a redirect to a drive-by download exploit site.

Trend Micro has additional details.



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