Microsoft offers $250,000 reward in Mydoom.B attacks

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. will pay a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for releasing the Mydoom.B worm, the company said in a statement yesterday.
The offer is part of Microsoft's $5 million bounty program to reward people for information relating to worm and virus authors, which was announced last November.
The Mydoom.B worm is similar to the Mydoom.A worm that appeared on Monday, but it also contains a scheduled denial-of-service (DoS) attack against Microsoft's Web site and a feature that blocks access to antivirus Web sites on infected machines.
Residents of any country are eligible for the award, Microsoft said.
According to Microsoft, the attack against the www.microsoft.com Web site is scheduled for February.
Microsoft said it's working with the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and Interpol in investigating the Mydoom.B worm, the release of which Microsoft described as a "criminal attack."
The reward offer comes just two days after The SCO Group Inc., whose Web site is apparently targeted for a similar DoS attack, offered a $250,000 reward of its own (see story). The attack against the SCO Web site was a part of the payload of the original Mydoom.A worm.
Mydoom, which is also known as Shimgapi and Novarg, began spreading early this week and has quickly become the most virulent e-mail virus ever, according to some antivirus companies.
It arrives in an e-mail with an attachment that can have various names and extensions, including .exe, .scr, .zip and .pif. When the attachment is executed, the worm starts sending copies of itself to other e-mail addresses stored in the infected computer.
In addition to an attack against Microsoft, the second variant of the worm also includes a feature that blocks infected computers from accessing sites belonging to vendors of antivirus products.