Can Microsoft bounty end viruses?
Microsoft's $5 million reward for antivirus informants may help catch script kiddies such as the German teenager suspected of authoring a variant of the Sasser worm, but it is unlikely to have any effect on virus writers working for organized crime syndicates, according to security experts.

Four months after the MSBlast worm tore through the Internet, Microsoft announced it had set up a $5 million fund, the Anti-virus Reward Program, to be used for rewarding people who offer information leading to a conviction with $250,000. Since the launch of the fund, a number of suspected authors of malicious code have been arrested, but none have been convicted.

Simon Perry, the vice president of security at Computer Associates, said the rewards may lead to script kiddies informing on each other, but it won't bother the organized criminals who have started using experienced software writers to create "malware," or malicious software, designed to enable them to take control over a large number of PCs.

Get the full story at news.com