While botnets can be an attack in and of themselves, they are an excellent tool for carrying out secondary scams and cybercrimes on a large scale. Some examples of common botnet schemes are as follows:

DDoS is a type of attack that involves flooding a server with web traffic in order to cause it to crash. Zombie computers are tasked with swarming websites and other online services, causing them to go offline for an extended period of time.

Phishing schemes impersonate trusted individuals and organisations in order to defraud them of sensitive information. This is typically accomplished through a large-scale spam campaign designed to steal user account information such as banking logins or email credentials.

Brute force attacks use programmes to forcefully breach web accounts. There are dictionary attacks and credential stuffing are used to exploit weak user passwords and access their data.