One million bots isn’t that much. Think that some companies have thousands of computers living with near-identical settings - one gets wanked, so do the others. Most residences now have multiple machines, too, in a similar situation. Granted, a lot of these cases mean a limited number of IP addresses are available to the bot-herder - but it’s a failover scenario, one host goes down, the next one can do the herder’s bidding.

Yet, I’m glad to see Operation Bot Roast happening. More than catching bot-herders¹, the real benefit I see stems from shutting down said bots. Many would say it’s a fool’s errand, trying to clear up the tens to hundreds of millions of bots worldwide; indeed it might be. But something relatively as high-profile as Bot Roast is also bound to raise awareness and get people to pay a bit more attention to the problem as a whole. To invest some time in personal defence software² and learn to manifest some intelligence when browsing malware-laden websites [a significantly harder problem, granted.] This won’t put a significant dent in bot numbers and would probably cause more advanced exploitation techniques to come about - but this is all there is. The security business is a cat-and-mouse game and will likely ever be so.

One million bots isn’t that bad. As long as this is just the start of it³.

1. When one drops dead, 5 others will rise up to take advantage of the computers left behind [↩]
2. There are sufficient free and open alternatives for all platforms in terms of firewall and antivirus software, so time to learn it is all you need [↩]
3. What if this was, in part, a clever ploy to arrest some individuals that the feds didn’t quite like? I’m hoping the forensic evidence is solid as it should be, otherwise I can see a lot of human and privacy rights advocates jumping the gun on this one - and rightly so. [↩]