OT: Hijacked botnet exposes startling online habits

[Charles Jones]

Stephen P Rufle wrote:
> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/252353/hijacked-botnet-exposes-startling-online-habits.html
>
> Thought it was interesting in regards to security. I did not read the
> pdf linked in the article, but it would be interesting to know what the
> breakdown by OS is :). Or does it even matter if most info is actually
> gotten through website exploits of some type.
Hijacking a botnet is pretty cool, I've done it myself a couple of 
times. However, my goal (which I succeeded in) was to deactivate as many 
of the bots as possible. These guys actually used the bots access to 
peoples PCs to peruse their emails and private information. The 
statistics they gathered are interesting, but was invading peoples 
privacy worth it? The botnets that I took control of had the same 
features (keylogger, etc), but if I had used those to invade peoples 
privacy (oh sorry, I mean "analyze messages"), wouldn't I have been no 
better than botnetters?