Comment by cyberax
8 hours ago
> serious question. Back in the 90s viruses were huge business,
No, they were not. They were toys written for fun and/or mischief. The virus authors did not receive any monetary reward from writing them, so they were not even a _business_. So they were the work of individuals, not large teams.
The turning point was Bitcoin. Suddenly it provided all those nice new business models that can be scaled up: mining, stealing cryptowallets, ransomware, etc.
Malware was absolutely used to sell botnet access in the 90s, millions of Windows machines were used for DDoS and as anonymous proxies
The '90s was a bit too soon for that. Most people using the Internet then were still on dialup, to the extent they were connected at all. There weren't that many DDoSes yet. Even the Trin00 DDoS in 1999 only involved 114 machines.
DDoS for sale were not a big thing until Bitcoin. You couldn't transfer meaningful amounts anonymously.
And no, lol. There were no million machine botnets in 90-s. You could DDoS the entire countries with a few dozen computers, Slammer did that accidentally with Korea.