but what’s more important is the intent
Afaik, the problem was a trojan inside the cracked windows images they used to avoid paying for windows keys. I doubt the intent was to create a botnet, it seems more like generic cybercrime.
I personally always wipe the preinstalled OS to avoid issues like this. However, make sure to use a clean image directly from the source. Simply reinstalling from within Windows wouldn’t have helped in this case, because the malware was part of the recovery files.
The story originated from a video from the “The Net Guy Reviews” YouTube channel. Most articles I’ve seen so far oversimplify the issue and/or get facts wrong, therefore I recommend checking out the original video if you want to learn more.
Yeah malware is everywhere - This could simply be a product of an individual actor abusing their position in a supply chain… but this also goes for hardware as well. It is certainly a more difficult vector to attack from but due to its ‘level’ it’s a valuable position to compromise.