BBC shows what happens when you buy a botnet

As a way to show its viewer how easily their computers could be a part of a botnet the BBC technology show Click went out and purchased what they called a low value botnet from one of the many underground Internet chatrooms. They then used that network to spam a Gmail and Hotmail account specifically setup up for this investigation.

After successfully leaving thousands of spam emails in those accounts in a matter of hours they turned their attention to performing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a site provided by security company Prevx. Once they completed all that they wanted to do the show left messages on the infected computers in the botnet that they were infected and then disabled the botnet.