Dave,

I've always known writers of virii (is that a word?) were malicious, but this takes it to a new level, that I have no doubt, will be emulated by others.

As you say, let's hope enough of these "effers" get caught and prosecuted, to prevent others from following in their footsteps.

Virii sounds good to me (but I probably never got better than a C in English class). ;-) 

Virus writers have gone beyond just being mean for a while now. A number of current virii were commissioned by, or rented to spam mailing companies to get the virus to mail out spam without it being traceable back to the spam mailing company (who make millions of dollars from the spam "advertisers").

My brother in law's computer was victim to something close to that except it didn't lock up the computer but started actually putting files all over the place. A message came up and said that the computer had just been infected and said that a recording of the harddrive would be sent to the FBI in 24 hours if he did not pay $500 dollars to what ever the organization was and gave a website. In investigating the files that
kept getting downloaded, they all had names that would indicate child porn. He only found two that actually contained kiddie porn and the rest were empty folders, so he cleared away the ones that he found and deleted them, however, the next time he booted up his computer there were three times as many with a new message telling that he now only had something like 15 hours. In contacting the email address given in the message, they responded with how to send money using western union. He kept the email and contacted the FBI. After 3 days it was all taken care of. Turns out that somehow he ticked off someone in a chat room and they sent him a file that he thought was something to back something that they had said (or so the story goes) and the file actually somehow gave them a backdoor into his computer. When he had a tech look at it, there was a new partition created that had this backdoor located in it. I pride myself on learning from other's mistakes and 1. I now stay away from chat rooms and 2. I never view any attachments without running them through a scan first.