Microsoft Offers Bounty For Mydoom Author
Microsoft Corp. offered a $250,000 reward for the arrest and
conviction of the Mydoom author, matching the bounty offered by SCO.
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday offered a $250,000 reward for the
arrest and conviction of the Mydoom author, doubling the bounty for the creator
of what some experts are calling the worst virus in history.
Microsoft and the SCO Group Inc., which offered a quarter-million-dollar reward
on Tuesday, are both targets of the nasty worm that continued to spread Thursday
across the Internet for the fourth consecutive day. Anti-virus software maker
Network Associates estimates the malicious code has infected as many as a
half-million computers.
Based on their code, Mydoom and its recently released variant Mydoom.b, are
scheduled to launch denial of service attacks against SCO and Microsoft,
starting Feb. 1. A DOS attack means the infected computers are set to overload
both companies' web servers with bogus information, preventing access by
legitimate users.
In addition, the Mydoom variant prevents infected computers from accessing the
web sites of Microsoft and many anti-virus software makers, making it difficult
for the owner of an infected machine to get help.
"This worm is a criminal attack," Brad Smith, senior vice president and general
counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement. "Its intent is to disrupt computer
users, but also to keep them from getting to anti-virus locations and other
sites that could help them. Microsoft wants to help the authorities catch this
criminal."
Microsoft and SCO are assisting the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S.
Secret Service in their investigation of the virus. Interpol, an international
police organization, is also investigating.
While not proven, SCO may be the target of such attacks because of its legal
challenge of the open-source operating system Linux, which the company claims
contains its copyrighted code. SCO's lawsuits have angered the Linux community
and its supporters.
Security experts monitoring Internet traffic said Thursday hackers are already
trying to access the "backdoor" Mydoom has created in infected machines. A
backdoor is a program that enables hackers to take control of a computer.
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