Microsoft posts $250K reward for Rustock botnet herders

From InfoWorld: Microsoft upped the ante on Monday in its months-long battle against the Rustock botnet by posting a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the hackers who controlled the malware.

It was the first time Microsoft used its malware bounty program since February 2009, when it offered the same amount for the people responsible for the fast-spreading Conficker worm.

Microsoft announced the reward early Monday in a blog written by Richard Boscovich, a senior attorney with the company's digital crimes unit. Microsoft also posted a reward document (PDF) that included an email address for tipsters.

"We decided to augment our civil discovery efforts to identify those responsible for controlling the notorious Rustock botnet by issuing a monetary reward in the amount of $250,000 for new information that results in the identification, arrest and criminal conviction of such individual(s)," Boscovich wrote.

Microsoft kicked off a take-down of Rustock in March, when its lawyers, including Boscovich, and U.S. Marshals seized the botnet's U.S.-based command-and-control servers.

Since then, the number of Windows PCs infected with the malware has dropped worldwide from 1.6 million to just over 700,000 as of mid-June, Boscovich reported earlier this month.

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