Firstly, the comments link points to comments.channelregister.co.uk, which cannot be resolved - I manually edited the URL to get here :) (smartarse aren't I?)

But it still makes me laugh how many people will click on links which they didn't ask for or expect, that come from random "friends" in MSN. These people deserve to have their PCs trashed.

Indeed they do, but that's probably not what happens.

If the malware is a half-decent rootkit, the machine is probably *more* secure afterwards than it was before. The new owners probably don't want it to be reformatted, so they will play (fairly) nice with the previous owners files and resources. The dimwit gets a more secure and better behaved box than they deserve and the rest of us get our machines trashed/overwhelmed with spam.

I see, the author of the article forgot to mention that they were photos of topless nymphets, right?

[NOTARY SOJAC]