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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?"

2 of 719 comments (clear)

  1. Here's an idea.. by greenerx · · Score: 4, Informative

    they should invest the 250000 into their security team and fix the vulnerabilities instead of chasing after 13 year olds

  2. +5 Insightful? Try -1 blatantly wrong! by kylef · · Score: 5, Informative
    It is also that Windows runs a ton of stupid, random crap in kernel space. Like Windows Media Player. Like Internet Explorer. Like Outlook. Like a ton of office stuff.

    This is one of the most blatantly false statements I have seen get modded up to +4 or +5 in a long, long time.

    Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and Outlook do NOT run in kernel mode whatsoever. They may talk to kernel-mode drivers like 95% of all user-mode software does (read from a file, talk to the network), but they absolutely do not run in kernel-mode!

    C'mon, people. If you want to bash MS, you can do better than make up ridiculous statements like that.