botnet

Almost instant billion device botnet, each with a new list of targets to infect in the contacts book.

A master controller sends hosts in the botnet a list of a few other devices it controls.

Or you might get more by embedding it into worms and phishing emails and running a botnet.

Of course then your attacker can just get a botnet to start mindlessly doing page views of your site...

But given a botnet can overwhelm your server anyway, Puzzles let you stay up for others with first class computers.

Wouldn't any kind of puzzle be too slow for embedded devices, yet trivial for a botnet?

A serious botnet attack will be able to spread it over thousands of IP addresses, but IME, those are relatively rare.

Why bother with a botnet when you already have access to their gmail account.

Also there's the involvement in actions just short of creating a banking-credential-stealing botnet.

This sounds like a job for a coordinated botnet to experiment with.

I think this is a 3+ year old botnet run by an attacker who hasn't kept up with the times.

I'd normally say that doesn't seem that high for a botnet or collection of botnets.

The reputation requirements here are a very low bar; as far as I can tell it's effectively "don't be a botnet".

Besides the fact that you can't turn off automatic updates (which makes Windows little more than a zombie node in Microsoft's vast botnet), the default setting is also to "send updates to...

"...used his botnet to steal data from the users of those computers on approximately 200,000,000 occasions" Must have some fast fingers to use nearly anything 200 million times...

A function taking Integers to Integers in a pure language cannot do I/O, and thus is "safe" to run, in the sense that I can be guaranteed it does not contain a trojan making my computer into a peer on a botnet.

Between the bootkit and the Bitcoin fiddling, Hacking Team is just a small step away from a Zeus Botnet.