A lot of people seem to think that setting up a botnet is difficult, and it's very surprising when you decide to research and actually do it. It's ridiculously easy. You can rent out established botnets with almost no effort, and if you can run payloads on compromised internet-enabled devices, you can set up your own and coordinate it without much fuss.

This is a big problem that no one really knows how to solve.

I wonder if there's a way to build a bot net that takes down other bot nets. Basically, create a feedback loop such that the decreasing price of a bot net leads to some action that drives the price back up.

I mean, look at the shenanigans Wells Fargo gets caught up in, which are worse than "buying likes" bot activity. Is it that unbelievable some manager with a bonus tied up in vanity metrics would use bots to boost them?