Microsoft is offering a quarter-million dollar reward for turning in the creators of the Downadup aka Conficker worm. Microsoft is coordinating with ICANN and other organisations responsible for the DNS infrastructure to register and block the domain names which could be used by the worm. The worm has an algorithmically-generated list of candidate command & control servers; eachinstance of the worm checks some of these periodically, providing an infection count and asking for updates. The reward system probably works, if the rewards are high enough, although it probably doesn’t work by punishing the criminal masterminds, but rather by providing a strong disincentive.”]
Source: https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/microsoft-offers-ransom-for-e-threat-authors/