http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/a_year_later_a_look_back_at_mc.html?wprss=securityfix

It was one year ago that McColo, a Web hosting company based in Northern California, was effectively taken offline by its two main ISPs after they were presented with evidence that McColo was largely responsible for the majority of spam on the Internet at the time (as well as other various malicious activities). After McColo was taken offline, the volume of spam dropped significantly for an extended period of time.  NSS saw a roughly 30% drop in spam levels on the Washington University network after McColo went down.

The article later notes, however, that if the same event were to take place again, the results would be quite different. Before, the downtime for spammers could be weeks or months.  Now the same event would likely only cost them a few hours of downtime as they have evolved their botnets and methodologies to provide better resiliancy.

This paper presents data from tests done on sixteen different AV products to determine their cleaning/removal capabilities against a set of malware. The tests were not conducted to determine detection ratings or protection but rather to see how well products could successfully remove malware from an already infected system.

According to the report's findings, only three products (eScan, Symantec, and Microsoft Security Essentials) were rated 'good' at both removing malware and removing leftover files. 

http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/removal/avc_removal_2009.pdf