There is a big incentive for both espionage motivated actors and financially motivated actors to set up proxy botnets. These can serve as an anonymization layer, which can provide plausibly geolocated IP addresses to scrape contents of websites, access stolen or compromised online assets, and launch cyber-attacks.
Examples of proxy botnets set up by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are the VPNFilter botnet and Cyclops Blink, both deployed by Sandworm and disrupted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Another example is the SOHO botnet alleged to be operated by a Chinese company called the Beijing Integrity Technology Group; this botnet was disrupted in September 2024 by the FBI.
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Source: Trend Micro
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