Microsoft not only gathered round the most important security companies, but it has also offered a $250,000 reward for any information which may lead to the arrest and conviction of the ones responsible for release of the “Conficker” worm. Last October, Microsoft warned about certain vulnerability in the services of its Server and announced that it might be attacked by a worm. But as soon as Microsoft spoke about this possible occurrence, the hackers had already brought it to life.

They 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. The estimates made on the number of machines infected with the worm showed that they vary from 2 million to more than 10 million PCs infected.

The company has its reasons to believe that as many as 3 million computers worldwide have remained infected. The awkward things about this Conficker worm is that it didn’t facilitate any kind of illegal actions, like any other malicious software would do. Conficker didn’t send any spam nor it hosted scam Web sites.

But this hasn’t stopped the security experts to think that the worm may be preparing for something much worse than the usual attacks. 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. And if one of those domains gets registered by the virus writer, it might be used to download malicious software.

Paul Vixie, founder of Internet Systems Consortium, a Redwood City, California, company whose open-source software powers millions of Internet servers around the globe, stated that the Conficker worm can represent a big threat. He added that nobody has yet felt the worst of it and that everyone is trying to postpone that day.