What do public perceptions about the Russian mafia.have to do with it?

This isn't true

as having noticed a drop is spam for last few days, I suppose it will go back up now the complete {censored} aren't running scared anymore

So why spoil it?? Perhaps if this story had proliferated and ended up widely believed to be true, real SPAMmers would have been put off and we'd have a reduction in SPAM??

I'm going to blame El Reg for every single piece of SPAM I get from now on!! It's all your fault! :-P

I thought I had found the perfect example of "user administration"!

All spammers should be shot.

Even if this is indeed only a rumour, lets hope somebody takes up the idea in earnest.

Well if the Russian mafia aren’t then some one has to, I Say el reg should form a elite black ops type hit squad armed with everything from M16's to Tactical Nukes and then to fund it film there exploits and sell it as an Action reality series to channel 4.

To Jon:

Go to www.spam.com and read why Hormel objects to their trademark being used with all capital letters. They prefer you spell it spam in lower case.

To An. Cow:

M16s and tactical nukes don't cure the problem of a zillion bots sending out spam. What you need is a wire cutters to go to the individual houses and snip the phone line or fiber optic cable. And for the heavy artillery, use some denial of service on the spammers' "bulletproof hosting" sites in China and wherever to take them offline. Better yet, nuke the undersea fiber optic cable and cut off most of the chinese websited from the rest of the world.

take over the botnets and use them to take off some of these "bulletproof" sites.

Bloggers have jumped the gun, perpetuated a myth and are now trying to cover themselves in glory by saying they made an oops?

Never mind, and the silver lining on this cloud of ineptitude is that had not the mainstream media been declared obsolete by these pioneers of journalism, all sorts of fact checking and other procedures would have delayed this story until it was too late.

But thanks to the blogger movement, bullshit is thrust forward as legitimate news before truth and accuracy have a chance to derail important mythical events.

I remember all too well living in the dark ages of journalism, when stories like this would never have seen the light of day.

Chalk this one up to another victory for the blogging community and another nail in the coffin of those stick-in-the-mud journos that have qualifications, experience, writing skills, and all manner of inconsequential and obsolete expertise.

What we need is a good old fashioned style internet worm that propogates through (inherently vulnerable) machines on botnets, and renders exploited computers inoperable with a simple single line dos command:

rmdir windows

Users don't lose their valuable data, but their machine is permanantly taken out of the botnet... and possibly the repair engineers at PCWorld will sell the hapless users a copy of Norton when they take the machine in to be fixed.

I don't get half the world will have read the initial story (IT world) and then read this and go on writing comments as if it happened anyway.

I was sure that this same story was circulated several (at least 2 - 3) years ago? I remember seeing it on the TV news and in the papers. I did a quick hunt and found the story of Vardan Kushnir - see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dowbrigade/2005/07/25/top-russian-spammer-bludgeoned-to-death-in-moscow/

Maybe this is where the inspiration for the current story came from? Other than the name only the cause of death seems different, with a death by bludgeoning (haven't we all wanted to do that to a spammer!)

No idea if the earlier story was true, but it was very widely reported - I guess reporters get spammed too.

Damn thats sad. The Russian mafia could have got a whole lot of nice press and goodwill from this. Plus lets face it.. no jury would convict if they were caught. :)