Corporate warfare is nothing new, but I think that we are going to see an increase in these types of 'hacker-for-hire' situations in the very near future.
ditto that.

What I think should be happening is law enforcement should be hunting out botnets, then tracking the owners of the botnet.

I have tracked down a few nets before, and It was simple. Hardly any botnetters bother to use SSL or something of that sort (I guess it would require quite a lot more extra coding.)