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Then i always begin to wonder why this hasn't been done already; is the combination of narcissistic recklessness and technical competence really that rare?

Pretty much. The closest was the "I Luv U" email which overwrote media files.

Since then, it's all about profit. Why destroy a computer when you can use it to send spam?

If you want to be really cruel, your "virus" would randomly alter a few numbers on any Excel spreadsheet it could access.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Unlike the 90's, viruses aren't typically coded for the purpose of doing as much damage as possible. Between eBay, Paypal, Amazon, and the other major e-commerce sites, the internet is now worth hundreds of billions - even trillions - of dollars every year. Dollars that would be lost if it went down or that can be stolen by the boatload. By and large, the motive for hacking - including the use of botnets - is all money driven these days. The two most common attack vectors are to either hold a site for ransom, threatening to take it offline via a Denial of Service attack if a certain mount is not paid or to simply use the masses of drones to slow down anti-phishing efforts by distributing the fake page across hundreds of bots (after all, you can run a web server using 500k of RAM and 200k of disk space, plus space for the pages, i.e. a Paypal clone takes up about 5MB on a drone.)

Judging by the size of this one, I'm going to guess its use will be the former rather than the later. 500,000 bots, all launched, say, the week of Christmas, would do a LOT of damage. Many of those systems will be corporate boxes and nobody will be sitting at them to monitor or notice anything, meanwhile a site that offers "last minute" shipping could be taken offline at the...well...last minute, costing them billions in lost sales. $10 mil would be a small price to pay to avoid that.

So yeah, it was more common in the 90's, but hacking solely to cause damage isn't something done any more. At all. The only people doing that would be, for example, if the Chinese were trying to crack a US State Department or Pentagon system (using the drones for brute force remote login attacks). That happens, but even there, the intent isn't to harm the systems, but merely to gain a valid login so you can steal information. This goes on in the corporate world too. After all, don't you think Ford would be willing to cough up $2 mil if someone could hand them a copy of Toyota's future business plan right now?

It's not so much that there aren't people who want to "just cause damage" but rather that those people grew up and realized they could make a lot of money by NOT damaging the systems. They needed jobs and there aren't a lot of positions available for someone with a skill set that includes brute forcing SSH logins. The generation that has come since them, mine (I'm 21, but I have friends who are 18 and 19, and we see each other as about the same) doesn't generally posses the level of skill of those who came before us. Sure, I can crack SSH and brute force NT Hashes with the best of them, but if you sit me and my 60 year old uncle both in front of a binary disassembler only he will know what he's doing, and finding the kind of flaw needed to make this massive botnet will require a very intimate knowledge of one.

Sorry, the script kiddies that bring the world to its knees have grown up and they refuse to work without pay.

Computer to 'Some simple concept' analogies are stupid as hell. Get over your elitism. Most people don't understand the first thing about computers, and they don't have to. Just like most people use a TV, VCR, whatever, without any clue how it works, they just use it to play movies. Blinking 12:00.

Your analogy fails because leaving a gun out is gross negligence. It's a dangerous thing, and that's fairly obvious. A computer isn't. I suppose an argument could be made that computers are dangerous. It would be quite a stretch though. In that case there should be mandatory licensing to operate one, you know... like a car. But there isn't. So, either make the argument that computers are dangerous and should be controlled (and make sure you understand the actual ramifications of that argument), or stfu and realize that no, most people don't understand Computer Security or why it's important, and they never will.

And then, as an expert in the field, learn that you aren't smarter than mom and dad using their computer, you just have a specialized skill set. Most nerd kids like prolly half the slashdot crowd are or were.. started out with computers coming naturally to them. It's easy to assume then that it shoudl come naturally to everyone. And when you see it doesn't, your first reaction is that something is broken in them. After that nerd grows up a bit in the world, that person learns that no... they aren't idiots. We just have an aptitude for something that others don't. And that doesn't make them dumb. They probably have skills we don't. Say... socializing for example. So my guess is your (and all those who always come to slashdot posting the same song and dance) maturity level hasn't quite evolved yet.

And to not be elitist myself... I can admit I was once the same way. I grew out of it, as will you. :)