Microsoft Corp. will pay a US$250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for releasing the Windows Mydoom-B worm, the company said in a statement Thursday.
The offer is part of Microsoft’s $5 million bounty program to reward people for information relating to worm and virus authors, announced last November.
The Mydoom-B worm is similar to the Mydoom-A worm that appeared on Monday, but additionally contains a scheduled denial of service (DOS) attack against Microsoft’s Web site and a feature that blocks access to anti-virus 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, which begins on Saturday.
Microsoft said it is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U. S. Secret Service and Interpol in investigating the Mydoom-B worm, the release of which Microsoft described as a “criminal attack.”.
Although MyDoom worms cannot infect Macintosh operating systems, many Mac users are being indirectly affected as they receive infected e-mail from Windows users. Mac users are also receiving bounceback messages from servers that reject infected e-mails which spoof their own e-mail addresses, garnered from the address books of infected Windows PCs. Mac users are advised not to forward any e-mails with attachments that contain content unknown to them to help prevent the spread of the worm.
Peter Cohen contributed content used in this article.