Reporters have called into question the ethics of an investigation into global cyber crime by the British Broadcasting Company which obtained a botnet via chatrooms on the Internet, hacked into 22,000 infected machines using their technology program Click, and launched a previously arranged Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.
The programme did not access any personal information on the infected PCs.
If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.
But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets’ collective power when in the hands of criminals.
Is your PC doing a hacker’s dirty work?
Before destroying their bots, BBC made users aware that their computers were part of a botnet by changing the desktop wallpaper to display a message from BBC Click. Guessing that produced a heart flutter.
BBC cybercrime probe backfires
