The BBC tech show Click bought a botnet to show how at risk we are for cyber crimes. The botnet consists of 22,000 hijacked PCs around the world and was purchased over the net through a chat room.
The Click team will show how effective spamming can be done with a botnet already of that small size.
After 2 hours of running their experiment the test email addresses used started filling up with thousands of junk emails.
Click also went on to test out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.
Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible. Click managed to overload the site with just 60 PCs
Click reported that Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details.
What would be interesting is how popular this is or could become in the SEO world. We have already seen the term Anti or Negative SEO thrown about, and some say it is becoming increasingly popular as normal SEO becomes increasingly harder.
Being able to buy 1,000 computers for less than £300 that can carry out a DDoS attack sounds like a reasonably affordable investment for the unscrupulous people out there.
Obviously it would look a little suspicious if you targeted multiple websites that you compete with but it quite possibly would be cheaper and just as effective as trying to link spam a competitor.
Obviously you would like to think people would not sink this low but this is unfortunately not the case with some “Craphat SEOs” even hacking into school websites to inject porn links.