Here’s an informative and depressing graphic, courtesy of Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure. It represents the prevailing market rates paid to malware distributors for successful infections in various countries. The screenshot was reportedly taken “from a website selling loads / malware installs.”
Yeah, that’s right. For a successful infection in a developed country like England or German, the bad guy gets 18 cents for infecting your PC. A thousand miserable users = $180 in revenue. For successfully taking over machines outside the developed world, the rate drops as low as 1.5 cents per infected PC.
How much do you suppose it costs to clean up each such mess? Hint: It’s a lot of pennies.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
For business users I rarely charge anything as they all have malware protection and some of their business specific software requires that the user have administrative rights to the workstations… Welcome to 2012…