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Microsoft Offers A Bounty On Virus Writers

Posted by timothy on from the must-bring-left-ears dept.

Iphtashu Fitz writes "According to news.com Microsoft will announce a bounty of $250,000 on Wednesday for information on who wrote two recent Windows viruses. The bounty is offered for information that leads to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus. Microsoft will officially announce the reward in a joint press conference with the FBI and U.S. Secret Service Wednesday morning. This is the first time a company has offered money for information about the identity of the cybercriminals. Could this be the start of a new trend in going after the writers of viruses & worms?"

3 of 719 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I heard they needed skilled people by Nevo · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Your take is complete hooey, also. Neither SoBig nor MSBlaster executed in kernel space. RPC service is.. hello! a service! It runs in a user mode program. Sobig was an email worm and ran in the user's context. Your analysis is garbage.

  2. Re:I heard they needed skilled people by stretch0611 · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    You know damn well that if Linux enjoyed the sort of desktop ubiquity that M$ has right now, we'd all be bitching about the latest exploit/virus/worm and complaining about how it takes so long to get them patched and why in $#%^&$%@#&* couldn't it have been written correctly in the first place!

    WRONG!, If Linux was that bad it never would have made it this far. I think Linux's stability gives it a larger appeal than the price. If that stability did not exist, we would all be using windows, os/2, or Mac instead of Linux.

    --
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    DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
  3. Bill, you surprise me once again. by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Very typical, Bill. Very typical.

    Once again, instead of fixing the problem, Microshucks is piling patch upon fix to hide the symptoms. Except in this instance, they are doing it with money instead of code.

    I think many agree that Microsnobs is attacked by many viruses because of flaws in their software. These defects come in many shapes and sizes, from vague little bugs (like some memory leak) to really bad design decisions (like Outlook executing untrusted code because doing so is "convenient").

    That's not to say, Bill, that you aren't smart. Hell, if I had half as much money as you, I'd buy my way out of all my problems, too.