The three Dutch men arrested a month ago on charges of creating and using a botnet of some 1.5 million machines have connections to Russian organized crime, media reports from the Netherlands said Tuesday. According to the reports, Dutch law enforcement officials have followed the money, and concluded that the trio worked with the "Russian Internet mafia." "The Internet is the perfect playground for organized criminal activity," said Marcus Sachs, a researcher at SANS Internet Storm Watch, in an online note Tuesday. "Near-total anonymity, multiple ways to launder money, enormous amounts of value and wealth, extreme complexity, few laws and fewer law enforcement experts, and millions of users who have no concept of what is going on inside their shiny new computer." The men -- Dutch law prevents suspects from being named in the press -- reportedly created a Trojan horse, dubbed "Wayphisher," that was designed to steal passwords to online accounts from bank customers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. They then sold the Wayphisher Trojan to contacts in Eastern Europe; soon after, Wayphisher was being used by Russian organized crime gangs to pillage e-bank accounts. The head of the botnet gang, a 19-year-old from Loon op Zand, a small town 30 miles southeast of Rotterdam, received regular payments from an account in Estonia, Dutch authorities now say; the payments were probably pay-offs from the Russians` strip mining of online accounts. In other developments, Dutch officials say that the three bought Apple iPod players and gaming systems with some of the money they made from their connections with the Russian mob. The Dutch botnet group has also been charged with extortion in the launch of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against adware supplier 180solutions, which last week acknowledged that the ringleader was a former distributor of its adware. Although further arrests are still expected in the case, Dutch police have as yet not announced any additional actions. The case has Sachs of the Internet Storm Watch more than pessimistic. "We face the real possibility that the Internet may implode on itself in the coming years, and will ultimately be a nice history lesson for future generations," he said. "I hope we can save it, but the current signs don`t point in that direction." Techweb