30,000 Clickers Can’t Be Wrong

Teenagers convicted last week of setting up a huge
network of compromised Windows PCs used it to gain an unfair advantage
in online gaming – not to send spam.

Detective Sergeant Steve Santorelli, of Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime
Unit, said the two principal suspects were members of a gaming clan which
used illicit access to an estimated 30,000 PCs to generate clicks and
therefore gain more points in a game called Outwar.

Outwar is an online game which you get farther ahead
by getting people to click your "special link." The more people
that click your link, the more money you get per hour, the more stuff
you can buy, and the more people you can attack. If you are the top player
in any of the three characters, you win an x-box.

Suspects in the case used the Randex worm to establish a 30,000 strong
botnet used to carry out "low profile DDoS attacks" and steal
the CD keys for games, he explained. "They had a huge weapon and
didn’t use as much as they could have done," Santorelli told El
Reg.

from The Register