Oscar told me he had an idea. He noticed so many cloud-based IaaS and PaaS were offering free trials and presumed it would be trival to build a botnet with only free computing. He was correct, and this research documents our experiment. We certainly were not the first people to do this (i.e. cyber criminals), but we were one of the first to talk about it publicly.
We theorized we could use ephemeral everything to make a botnet that would be such a ghost, that by the time anyone suspected it was there, it would be gone. Starting from a tails usb image and using a cloud-based IDE, we built a botnet from cloud platforms and amassed unlimited storage, compute, and engaged in litecoin mining with a 1000 node botnet. We even developed a BC/DR IR plan for our operation. Defense against this seemed bleak, best bet seemed user behavior modeling; which happy to say is becoming more popular. Cloudbots — Harvesting Crypto Coins Like a Botnet Farmer was a fun project and the closest I felt to being a criminal without crossing the line, if violating T&C is not considered crossing that line: