Over the course of a few days in February 2000, a lone hacker was able to bring some of the Web s larger sites to their knees, using just a few dozen machines and some relatively primitive software to cripple Yahoo, eBay, E*trade, Amazon, ZDnet and others for hours at a time. Nearly 10 years after those attacks, botnets are not just weapons of mass disruption for hacktivists and bored script kiddies, but serve as the foundation for the worldwide cybercrime underground.
Source: https://threatpost.com/root-botnet-epidemic-113009/73167/