Catching the Conficker feckers

Davey Winder
Saturday, 14 February 2009 19:08

IT Industry - Market

Microsoft has joined forces with a number of security industry giants to form what has become known as the Conficker Cabal. Outfits such as AOL, F-Secure, ICANN and Verisign devoting their resources to catching the Conficker feckers.

The announcement was only made at the end of last week, but you had better believe these guys have been working hard together to chop this worm up for some weeks.

I wish them luck, and I certainly believe that the hard work of security researchers in the lab is the way forward.

Which is why I was surprised to see Microsoft throwing money at the problem. It has a track record of doing this in the past, with a half million dollar reward offered for the arrest of the Blaster and Sobig worm authors in 2003.

Or how about the following year when it coughed up a quarter million to informers who contacted Microsoft about the Sasser and Netsky worm author, Sven Jaschan.

Now Microsoft has posted a bounty of another quarter million for the head of the Conficker fecker.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, is not sure it will be enough. He says "...while a USD 250,000 reward has successfully caught teenage hackers in the past, the bounty may not offer enough temptation to inform on an organised criminal gang making big money out of malware."