How my Botnet Purchased Millions of Dollars in Cars and Defeated the Russian Hackers MICHAEL SCHRENK This is the true story of a botnet that created a competitive advantage for a car dealership. This dealership found a website that offered returned lease vehicles—great cars for their inventory—but bad web design and heavy competition from other automotive dealerships made the website useless. In response, a botnet was developed to make automotive purchases with machine precision. With the bot, they could acquire any cars they wanted, without interference from competing dealerships. During its one-year life, this botnet autonomously acquired many millions of dollars in cars. Along the way, it successfully adjusted to competition from a similar bot developed by Russian hackers while maintaining a sufficiently low profile to "stay below the radar" of everyone involved. Michael Schrenk (@mgschrenk) is a Las Vegas based webbot developer, online entrepreneur and writer, who has developed commercial botnets and webbots since 1995. He is the author of "Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition (2012, No Starch Press, San Francisco). Mike has presented talks at DEF CON 10, 11, 15 and 17 and wrote about DEF CON 5 for Computer World Magazine. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/webbots