A botnet refers to a group of computers which have been infected by malware and have come under the control of a malicious actor. The term botnet is a portmanteau from the words robot and network and each infected device is called a bot.
Botnets can be designed to accomplish illegal or malicious tasks including sending spam, stealing data, ransomware, fraudulently clicking on ads or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
