Microsoft has decided to take its computer security out from the company’s walls. After being harassed by malicious worms for not reaching to convince the server administrators to take the Security Bulletin MS08-067 more seriously, Microsoft Corporation formed a cyber security group as to break the Conficker worm’s infrastructure.

In addition, the corporation has also offered a $250,000 reward for any information which can lead to the arrest of the ones who are guilty for the occurrence. Last October, Microsoft talked about certain vulnerability in the services of its Server and stated that it might be attacked by a worm.

As soon as the hackers heard about the warning Microsoft had made, they brought their threat to life. The cyber criminals thus infected almost 9 million computers by the middle of January 2009 and Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek stated that nearly 30% of the weak systems remained unpatched at the time.

Yet, the problem has been left undiminished until today. For example, Symantec announced that almost 500,000 infections happened every day in the last five days with W32. Downadup.A and 1.7 million with Downadup.B. The “savage Windows worm,” as Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks, called it on a blog post on Thursday, has no intention to stop and the entire number of computers infected varies as a consequence of disinfection efforts.

So Microsoft decided to take the problem more seriously and to imply a lot more people in it. The corporation announced on Wednesday that they would wish to make a partnership with some technology companies, academic organizations, and Internet infrastructure companies as to fight against this “savage Windows worm.”

ICANN, Neustar, VeriSign, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International, M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, researchers from Georgia Tech, Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks, and Support Intelligence were chosen by Microsoft to be a part of the fighters against Conficker/Downadup worm.

Greg Rattray, ICANN's chief Internet security adviser, said that the best way to fight against such kind of potential botnets is to gather round the whole security and domain name system communities. He added that this is what ICANN does. The company coordinates these kinds of efforts and manages to make the Internet a safer and stable place.

Also Kevin Haley, director of security response at Symantec, said in a telephone interview that the time was right as to form such a strong community to fight the worm. The researchers at Symantec have been trying to reverse the algorithm used to produce a daily list of 250 domains that the worm depended on to download updates.

Considering the fact that the researchers don’t lack the knowledge, they are now trying to discover and log the infected systems. Still, they are all aware of the fact that the worm won’t be stopped this way, as their tactics have also to include a peer-to-peer update mechanism. Nevertheless, this coalition represents a start.