[jastanton]

It's fairly easy to get serp just by spinning up some ec2 instances. You can make a good number of requests just by providing proper headers. That is, assuming the last guys using that ip didn't just do the same and get rate limited. All this to say this seems to be a lot of trouble just for SERP results.

[paxtonab]

I was also thinking that if competitors showed up in the results you could then use the botnet to then link bomb them?

I agree that it does seem like quite a bit of effort for an undetermined purpose though...