The company's offering a bounty for the operators behind the Rustock botnet, which the company helped disable in March. Before it went offline, the botnet proved capable of sending billions of spam e-mails per day.
In exchange for information leading to those operators' arrest and conviction and whatnot, Microsoft is now willing to pay some $250,000. That's a pretty big chunk of change, and the company's probably betting it's enough to persuade someone to sell their botnet-building buddy out.
"This reward offer stems from Microsoft's recognition that the Rustock botnet is responsible for a number of criminal activities and serves to underscore our commitment to tracking down those behind it," Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a July 18 email posted on The Official Microsoft Blog. "The legal action Microsoft has taken in civil court has already been successful, helping us take down the Rustock botnet and disrupt its operations."
Translation: We want these people caught in the worst way.
Before its shutdown, estimates of Rustock's size varied between 1.1 million and 1.7 million infected computers, and the botnet may have been responsible for 47.5 percent of all spam spent worldwide by the end of 2010. Microsoft blocked the IP addresses controlling the botnet, in conjunction with a coordinated seizure of Rustock command-and-control servers located at five hosting providers in seven U.S. cities: Denver, Scranton, Pa., Kansas City, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, and Columbus, Ohio.
Microsoft's been aggressive in the botnet-killing department. In February 2010, the company helped persuade a federal judge in Virginia to issue a temporary restraining order that cut off the 277 Internet domains associated with Waledac, which was blamed for producing more than 1.5 million spam messages per day. Having infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world, Waledac was considered a big enough threat to attract the attention of not only Microsoft, but also Symantec, Shadowserver Foundation, the University of Washington and a handful of others joined together in an initiative termed "Operation b49."
At the time, security experts questioned whether such legal maneuvers would ultimately be sufficient to curb the increasingly endemic issue of botnets. Microsoft's latest bounty on Rustock's operators suggests the company is taking ever-harder steps to deal with the threat.
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