Creating botnets
In Chapter 7, Advanced Malware, we developed a malware program that can contain one hacker and one victim program. This is useful when you want to carry out an attack on one specific target. However, in a lot of cases, you would want to have one command and control center for the hacker and a lot of victim programs running on different machines and communicating with one hacker program, with the hacker being able to control these devices remotely. These are what we call botnets. Botnets are small programs that run on different machines and communicate with one command-and-control center. They are used for a lot of malicious purposes, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where you make a certain website go offline by generating millions of requests at a time or use the resources of computers to mine cryptocurrency, and so on.
Let's start creating our own botnet and then create different bots to communicate with the command-and-control center...