The minds behind BBC’s television program "Click" have inadvertently thrust themselves into an ethical quagmire.

Recently, the team at Click purchased a botnet to demonstrate to viewers the power wielded in the cyber-underworld. The team used the roughly 22,000-machine botnet to spam Hotmail and Gmail accounts they controlled, as well as to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a site owned by security vendor Prevx. The DDoS attack was performed with Prevx's consent.

According to Click, the team shut down the botnet after their experiment was finished. Though the team said they never accessed information on the compromised PCs, they also claimed they notified the owners of the bots that they were infected. Click did not respond to an inquiry by eWEEK before publication, but those involved appear to have done this by modifying desktop wallpapers with messages to the owners that their computers were infected.

While Click maintains that no laws were broken, opinions on their experiment – which proved something that most people already know – were mixed, to say the least.

 Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.