Great article... THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS On the trail of cyberextortionists.
 

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact

One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company?s clients, a penileenhancement business called MensNiche.com. The engineers, gathered in the company?s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. Anna Claiborne, one of the company?s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company?s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. ?Hence,? she said, ?I look like hell today.?

MensNiche?s problems had begun a week earlier, with a flood of fake data requests?what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack?from computers around the world. Although few, if any, of those computers? owners knew it, their machines had been hijacked by hackers; they had become what programmers call ?zombies,? and had been set loose on MensNiche. The result was akin to what occurs when callers jam the phone lines during a television contest: with so many computers trying to connect, almost none could get through, and the company was losing business.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact

I dig those stories. Here's an older one for a gambling website:

http://www.csoonline.com/read/050105/extortion.html