Self propogating virii and spam correlation

["Keith T. Morgan" <keith.morgan () terradon com>]

I have never been a firm believer in co-incidence.  As a result of this, I've drawn a potential correlation that might 
bear some investigation.

We're all aware of numerous self-replicating virii that spread via Outlook contact lists.  One particular customer was 
nailed with the "goner.scr" virus.  That one spread very rapidly and thier AV systems had no .dat files to catch them.  
It was several hours before thier AV vendor had an update.  

This is one in a long list of virii that generally do no harm other than self replicatoin.  Now for the co-incidental 
part.

This particular organization was lucky prior to this virus outbreak.  They had a very, VERY minimal spam problem.  
Incidents of spam were few and far between.  Within a week of being infected with this virus, the volume of spam 
increased over 1000%.  The problem suddenly became so severe that they elected to purchase a content scanner to 
aleviate the problem.

Now... noting the close timing of this, my twisted little brain started rolling along the dark side of the force...  If 
I were a spammer... and I need a few hundred thousand VALID email addresses to dump my garbage on...  collecting those 
things manually would be a real PITA.   Hmmm... if I could write a self-replicator that ships me everyone's contact 
list.. that'd be a most rikitik way of gathering a huge marketing base with an hour of code-writing and 15 or 20 
minutes of replication.

Anyone see where I'm going with this?

Has anyone seen a similar connection between a virus outbreak and an influx of spam?