It looks like the government finally took action against several ISPs that have become havens for spammers and distributors of malicious and illegal content, including child porn.
We found an article in Computerworld the reports the ISP shut-down orders issued by a US District court based on a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission after several ISPs refused to do anything to curtail the illegal actives of several of their users. It appears that in some cases the ISPs tried to cover up the illegal activities and may have played an active role in some of the illegal activities. The ISPs who have been shut down include Pricewert, 3FN, Triple Fiber Network, APS Telecom, APX Telecom, APS Communication and APS Communications.
The FTC also claimed that 3FN.net operated large botnets and recruited others, called bot herders, to run the networks of computers compromised by the malicious software distributed by the botnets. A botnet is a large group of computers on which viruses or other types of software has been installed that allows the compromised computers to be controlled remotely by others. Botnets can be used to send spam and launch denial-of-service attacks. Most of the time, the owners are unaware that their computer is participating in an attack.