To analyze the entire internet’s digital conflicts in real time, Arbor ran a system called BladeRunner, named for its bot-tracking purpose. It was part of a collection of millions of “honeypots”—virtual computers running on Arbor’s servers around the world, each of which was expressly designed to be hacked and conscripted into a botnet’s horde of enslaved PCs. Arbor used the computers as a kind of guinea-pig collective, harvesting them for malware samples and, more important for the company’s business model, to monitor the instructions the bots received from botnets’ command-and-control
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