Botnets and the Nuclear Option
It's not unheard of for bot software to include commands to incapacitate the system, although it's unlikely that a botmaster would use the commandAfter all, the botnet is valuableBut Brian Krebs of the Washington Post tells a story of a recent episode in which the "nuclear option" was exercised and more than 100,000 systems were made unusable.
The bot was mostly in Poland and Spain and the bot software is "Zeus" which specializes in stealing passwords and other valuable data from systemsZeus contains a "kos" or "kill operating system" command which nukes key parts of the registry(Krebs quotes someone else as saying that killing these registry keys makes it impossible to boot the operating systemI would think that "Last Known Good Configuration" at the boot menu should still work, although it would restore the malware as well.)
The column speculates on why the botnet was destroyedOne idea is that another crime group co-opted it and killed itThe other was that, after a large collection of identity data, they killed the PCs to make it harder for users to deal with their identity theft problem.
Once your PC is "0wned" as they say, it's really a case of anything goesIn the end this case doesn't really shock me; malware makes systems unusable all the time, although not necessarily by design.