Botnet for academic purposes

I want to make a botnet, maybe with virtual machines or something. I've heard that some botnets are IRC-based. Any ideas about where to start for making a botnet? I am less concerned with the getting-people-to-install-shit angle, and more interested in the concepts of stealth, steganography, command & control, and distributed systems stuff.

if I were a spy or APT dude, I'd make honeypot ``amateur'' malware for researchers to analyze, and it'd look amateurish but in actuality it'd have VM escape 0-days for VMware/Virtualbox/QEMU and then I'd establish reverse shells on their host OSes or something

UEFI rootkits or some shit

fuck with their research efforts somehow