A US and Canadian task force investigating last year's blackout that cut power to an estimated 50 million North Americans published its final report Monday, finding that institutional, human and computer failures--not the MSBlast worm--led to the outage.
Microsoft released a removal tool for the MSBlast worm on Monday after Internet service providers complained that home users' PCs infected with the malicious program are still causing network congestion
Call it the Frankenworm.
Microsoft will announce on Wednesday in the U.S. that it will offer two US$250,000 bounties for information leading to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus, sources have told CNET News.com.
Program files designed to exploit two major vulnerabilities in Microsoft software are being used to attack computers, but security experts worry that worse--an MSBlast-type worm--could be ahead.
Microsoft will work with law enforcement to track down writers of worms, viruses and other malicious code, and is ponying up US$5 million to fund the search.
A worm that takes advantage of what some security experts describe as the most widespread Windows flaw ever has started spreading, while new analysis has uncovered a time bomb in the worm's code poised to unleash a furious denial of service attack at Microsoft itself.
The MSBlast worm supports the view that patches, while necessary to increase the security of specific computers, can't be relied upon to protect large networks.
The software giant eliminates the Windowsupdate.com address that the self-propagating MSBlast worm was set to attack.
As the MSBlast worm makes it clear that something must be done about insecure PCs, Microsoft has said this may be the time to take more control of the Windows update mechanism.
Conceding that its strategy of patching Windows holes as they emerge has not worked, Microsoft plans next week to outline a new security effort focused on what the company calls "securing the perimeter," a company executive said.
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