A security researcher and CEO of SecTheory, Robert Hansen, has been doing just that in recent months, having a series of off-the-record conversations with spammers and malicious hackers. Hansen says that the attacker was lamenting the difficulty of executing targeted attacks against machines in high-value networks. The value of a large botnet for executing DDoS attacks or extracting valuable data from the compromised machines could be multiplied hundreds or thousands of times using this model. This model makes sense on a number of levels and may well have been implemented already.”]