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If you’re in need a zombie-PC army, for whatever nefarious or good-intentioned task you’ve got in mind, it might not cost you as much as you’d think. How does £17 per 1,000 machines sound? Hell, with just £133 in your pocket you can set up your own 10,000-machine cluster.
Those prices are for mixed-world locations, meaning you don’t really care where they are and are just up for a bargain. If, for instance, you wanted a British cluster of zombie machines, they go for up to £400 for 10,000 of the things.
It’s amazing how easy and cheap it is to buy your own personal botnet army, and you can even use WebMoney, Liberty Reserve, or bitcoins to purchase them. In fact, I’m almost surprised PayPal isn’t listed, but maybe it’s just something to do with the commission it charges. I know it’s illegal and all, but you could almost see these things used for good. Buy up 10,000 of the things and you’ve got a cluster to crunch numbers on. You could set up an absolutely killer Folding at home team for instance.
Anyway, the figures have been put together by web security firm Webroot, so we can’t vouch for accuracy, but apparently you can check it out for yourself as the underground marketplace is open to all. I would just suggest you do it through a Tor or something, and definitely not from work — something tells me your IT manager would have a fit if he saw those logs. [Webroot via The Register]
Image credit: Botnet from Shutterstock
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You should have included this in your deals of the day
I’m going to buy some and set it up to ignore Casey Chan & Jesus articles.
“Want to your own British Botnet?” … does that even make sense, although I am very tired!
You and me both.
I love how Giz will correct grammar and spelling and not say so, meaning the comments that point out the error no longer make sense. How about a note at the end, a la The Guardian, to say you’ve edited the original article?
Or would that make whoever subs this stuff look silly?
You do have subs? Thought not…
What do you think my comment above is meant to indicate?
You don’t comment every time.
Yes I do (although I’m not sure what I could do with it).
I’d like a botnet army that can hack some financial institution and safely funnel me £2 million (that’s my minimum retirement fund)
OR
A botnet army that means if I stand in the next General election with my own party I get 70% of the vote so I can start putting this country right
Number 2 is easier than number one, you could buy an enormous botnet army in the UK that could bombard the computers it infects with adverts for you/your campaign
Probably be cheaper than an actual campaign too.
Cheers, now if only this article said how to find a botnet army, it said it’s easy but no helpful advice
I believe it is… http://cheapshop.su
dammit I put in brackets and everything hoping it wouldn’t come up as a link! I apologize! If someone can edit it for me that’d be much appreciated….
thanks but it doesn’t work (probably best, I’d probably end up being a bit dictatorial
).
I’m guessing you wouldn’t be able to rent the botnet for an hour or two and push a message to all the bots telling the end-user their computer was infected. That’d be amusing.
If you still wanna buy Bitcoins in the UK, directly without intermediators on ebay or other middle men (with huge fees) is difficult, I made this guide with an easy process:
http://howtogetbitcoinsuk.blogspot.co.uk