BBC buys its own botnet

 

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Posted on 12 Mar 2009 at 07:48

The BBC has bought a 22,000 PC botnet to expose how easy it is to buy hijacked machines online.

The Corporation's Click programme claims it purchased the botnet after "visiting chatrooms on the internet".

The botnet was used to send out spam to two test email addresses created by the BBC, and then to simulate a denial-of-service attack on a security company's back-up server.

The BBC claims it took only 60 machines bombarding the server with requests to knock over the dummy site.

Despite hijacking real PCs, the BBC claims it's done nothing illegal, because the exercise wasn't done with criminal intent.

The BBC says it's warned the affected users their machines were infected and advised them on to how make their computers more secure. The programme makers also insist they didn't access any personal data on the machines, although that does raise the question of how they managed to contact the owners of the infected PCs. The BBC was unable to comment at the time of publication.

The BBC didn't reveal how much it paid for the botnet, although figures from experts suggest it was in the region of £5,000-£6,000.

"Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 [machines] because they've got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details," McAfee security analyst, Greg Day, told the BBC.