I just had an interesting idea: what if a large, centrally controlled country such as China were to develop and deploy a national control agent whereby a central command could wield upward of a billion hosts simultaneously.

Naturally, my first thoughts go to DDoS, but there could be legitimate uses as well. They could charge companies for load testing. They could send the botnet jobs requiring massive computation. It’d be an Internet-connected supercomputer capable of ungodly force.

They’d want to pay close attention to security of course, since having a remote control agent on so many computers would be disastrous if the agent itself and/or its C&C were cracked, but any government crazy enough to try such a thing might not care (see China and its WoW mining prisoners).

Hell, this might not be fiction. I don’t put much past China at this point. ::