[nybble41]

I agree that 10 years (any years) in prison is excessive for what he was accused of, but the term being thrown around in this thread was "victimless crime". The mere fact that someone had to pay to clean his botnet from their systems means that this crime had a victim.

A more reasonable sentence would have been 2-3x the cost of the cleanup—and details on the systems that were compromised—plus a certain amount of (extrajudicial) social ostracism along the lines of ISPs not being willing to sell him Internet access based on his past history of abusing such privileges.