The Register recently did a story on a growing industry based around renting out botnets to ne'er-do-wells who don't have the skills or time to collect their own. You can rent botnets by the hour, apparently, to use them for spamming, DOS attacks, or whatever nefarious deeds strike your fancy.
Remember, botnets are collections of hacked PCs, usually on cable modem, DSL, or other “always on” connection. Some botnets have been discovered that contained over 250,000 hacked machines (zombies), waiting patiently for commands from the master. The majority of recent worms and other large-scale viruses have been specifically designed to turn the infected systems into...