Worm Book Post #4

The fourth part of the book, Worm, starts out with talking about the Conficker worm. This was a virus no one knew the potential of. Not many people new the source of where the virus was even coming from. Mark writes about Rick, an online security expert, “Markoff quoted Rick: ‘If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steering toward the horizon’” (Bowen, 129). The reason I choose this quote is to show how big of a deal Rick made of this event. I do not believe the public knew the threat level of the attack as Rick did. The Conficker worm spread fear through the online community of people who were following it for what the virus could do, the potential the worm had to destroy and steal information on so many computers. Businesses, like Microsoft, were also becoming worried of the Conficker worm affecting their computers, and offered a 250,000-dollar reward for whomever could identify the person or persons who created the worm. My question when I read how Microsoft was paying to have someone identify the person or persons who created the worm is, why is a company paying for the person identifying the worm, rather then the government taking more of an action to find the people responsible? The government was probably working very hard in order to find out who was behind the attack. This is especially after receiving advice on how bad the Conficker worm was going to be by online security experts. It does not seem right to have a company pay to help find the person or persons the government is looking for. Microsoft is paying in order to help keep their reputation of their operating system safe, but I still do not believe they should have to pay that much money to catch the people responsible.