What is the purpose of antivirus companies? They produce tools to detect and remove malicious software on a large number of computers. Their basic process is pretty simple. They collect samples of new malicious software from various sources, including the general public. You, too can send a piece of software to antivirus companies if you suspect it might be malicious. Each sample will be analyzed by the antivirus company. If it really is malicious, a signature will be produced and disseminated to all users of the company’s products through an automated mechanism. After receiving the new signature, antivirus software is capable of detecting the new malicious software and often also stopping it from working in one way or the other.

Sounds innocent, but the bad guys discovered this might be a suitable infrastructure to enforce end-user license agreements. If you rent a botnet and fail to comply with its operators‘ terms, they threaten to forward your bot to antivirus companies. I really like that idea, although I see a couple of pitfalls here, as do the guys who originally reported this.