In yet another case demonstrating the bitter taste that malware leaves in peoples mouths, a man from Washington state in the U.S. has recently plead guilty to spreading a trojan via IRC. He now will face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for his work. Using just IRC private queries, he managed to cause people on the DarkMyst IRC network to visit malicious links and ultimately become infected. He then used the infected machines to glean information from people, though it hasn't been stated what sort of information he was after.
Just a drop in the bucket, for sure, but it is interesting to see how much more often we see individual criminals being found out.