Who wants $250,000?  I sure do!  Off the top of my head, I can name more things than I can count that I can do with that much money.  This amount – £172,000 – is actually well within your reach IF you know the person behind the Conficker worm.  This worm started circulating in October of 2008 and has since then infected countless computers – we’re talking of millions here – all over the world.

So you might be wondering who would be so mad that he would be willing to give that much money away…take a guess?  You probably didn’t have to think much.  Who else would be so affected by a worm?  The software giant, Microsoft, has always been prone to attacks from such malware and sees the Conficker as a “criminal attack.”  According to George Stathakopulos of the company’s Trustworthy Computing Group, “people who write this malware have to be held accountable.”  Hence the reward for whoever could find the person behind the worm.

I doubt that you have not heard of the worm before but for the benefit of those who might not have, Conficker takes advantage of computers which are not updated with regard to Windows security patches.  It is a self-replicating program and can infect computers via the Internet or those innocent looking USB sticks you use on a daily basis.  And once the worm has found its way to your hard drive, it is quite hard to remove as it immediately finds ways to burrow a hole and set up defences to keep itself safe.  Once set up, the worm can be used to steal data, among other things.

Now back to the reward.  Do you think that they will ever catch the perps this time?  Remember, they still have rewards up in the air for the creators of three other worms – Blaster, MyDoom and Sobig.

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