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.

>>30

But researchers are high value targets. They can mess up your malware operations, so keylogging or ratting them could lead to getting dirt on them or something so you could make sure they don’t mess with you.

This is all just hypothetical, of course. But because I am only going to have a local VM pseudo-botnet, I don’t really need to think about this too much.

But what I am saying is that targeting malware researchers definitely makes sense for malware developers. Why would a malware dev just sit idly by and let malware researchers disrupt their livelihood?