In recent years, botnets have become a popular, even indispensable tool or “vehicle” for a broad range of crimes on the Internet. Botnets are generally defined as networks of malware-compromised or “enslaved” computers connected to the Internet under the control of one or more persons called botherders or botmasters. A bot, a term derived from the word robot, is a single compromised computer within the network of infected computers.

The malicious software (also denoted as malware) that is hosted on the machines basically allows botmasters to control them remotely and in an automatic fashion. Although botnets are nowadays considered as malicious networks, historically they did not have a criminal purpose. They were mainly used for controlling the interactions in the chat rooms of Internet Relay Chat ...