“Paras and Dalton earned as much money in one month from click fraud as they ever made with DDoS. By January 2017, they had earned over US $180,000, as opposed to a mere $14,000 from DDoSing.”
Three teenagers built the botnet that took down Dyn, Germany’s largest ISP and all of Liberia. Mirai infected 65,000 devices in its first 20 hours. The DOJ asked for no jail time and got five years of probation plus work for the FBI. The device makers who shipped the open doors paid nothing.