Microsoft on Monday offered a $250,000 bounty to anyone who could provide information that would lead to the arrest of the minds behind the notorious spamming operation known as the Rustock botnet.
“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,” wrote Richard Boscovich, Microsoft’s senior attorney in its digital crimes unit, in a Monday blog post. “While the primary goal for our legal and technical operation has been to stop and disrupt the threat that Rustock has posed for everyone affected by it, we also believe the Rustock bot-herders should be held accountable for their actions.”
A botnet is a network of private computers that have been infected with malicious software, and effectively turned into zombies that are controlled as a group without the knowledge of the computers’ owners.
The Rustock botnet was a network of computers controlled by an unknown group of people, suspected to be in Russia, between 2006 and March of this year, when Microsoft successfully launched a legal action that enabled it to seize key computers that had been infected and were enabling the network’s activities — which was primarily to send out spam.
At one point, the infected PCs were sending out 25,000 messages an hour.
Boscovich said in his blog post that the network at its height was able to send out 30 billion spam e-mails a day, advertising counterfeit pharmaceuticals and software for sale.
