Our blog has been quiet for a few days as we work on putting together some new guides to securing your computer and some other resources to help our visitors secure their PCs--and keep them that way.

We hope to have that wrapped up in a couple of days here, but meanwhile, more news from the Conficker /Downandup front.

Microsoft announced in a press release today they're putting up a tidy reward of $250,000 (US) for info to bring the miscreant[s] to justice. In their press release about the Conficker reward Microsoft disclosed that they're working with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and "operators within the Domain Name System" to disable sites that are targeted by Conficker.

"To optimize the multiple initiatives being employed across the security industry and within academia, Microsoft helped unify these broad efforts to implement a community-based defense to disrupt the spread of Conficker."

While it's hard to discern from the lawyerese press release exactly what they're doing, there definitely appears to be a concerted effort to stem the tide of this worm. Among the groups involved are:

ICANN NeuStar VeriSign CNNIC Afilias Public Internet Registry Global Domains International Inc. M1D Global AOL Symantec F-Secure ISC researchers from Georgia Tech The Shadowserver Foundation Arbor Networks Support Intelligence

Notable on the list to us were the Georgia tech researchers as well as anti-virus software makers Symantec and F-Secure. We salute the private sector and education researchers for working together on this.

Too bad it takes a worm outbreak to make such an effort happen.

On February 6, 2009, more information was made available by Microsoft about Protecting Windows from Conficker. We encourage our readers to have a look.