To cover themselves during the reconnaissance effort, the ring’s leaders would investigate potential targets with several hundred bots, confusing any search for the location of the real person. The spy would connect from his Internet service provider to an encrypted virtual private network (VPN), a kind of secure tunnel most common in large corporations with employees in the field. The VPN would take them to a bot, and only from there would the extortionists connect to the target. The eventual attacks would use “rooms” in IRC channels that had a thousand bots each.
