Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits (Washington Post)

Yup, very interesting. I think the 3.5 million is actually much bigger, and the researchers admit that.
But I guess that the summed profits of the spammers are much bellow the summed losses of all the internet users: time waisted sorting the messages that pass, researchers efforts that could go into other more useful fields, the electrical energy consumption, network slowdowns and, maybe, the lost mails that don't pass the filter. I don't know if I ultimately lost any valid message, but I did lose a lot of time with people that did not receive my message the first time and vice-versa.