A scary thought just occured to me.

As we know, there are millionaire spammers out there, ie. people who've made a fortunate by sending out spam.

We also know that some virus writers co-operate with spammers, either by setting up zombie networks of proxy machines to actually send the spam, or creating zombie web farms to host the sites or collecting email addresses for spam purposes via worms. Obviously they get paid for their efforts.

We assume there are virus writers out there that do this for a living. But how good money are they making? We don't know...but for a succesful virus writer who has good deals with good spammers it could be substantial.

So, I wonder: are there millionaire virus writers out there?