A $950 botnet burns your AI credits while your site stays up

A seller under the name WraithTools advertises x47.c, a Windows botnet with DDoS, credential theft, SOCKS5 proxies and an AI API drain mode. Qrator Labs documented the offer from the seller's advertisement, technical documentation and panel screenshots↗ ¹². A listing dated 3 August 2026↗ put the base package at $200, the DDoS add-on at $150 and the full arsenal at $950 ²³.

The site stays up while the account runs dry

The control panel offers 18 attack methods↗, and the drain is not a flood. The operator supplies a victim's valid API key and a model name, and the bots send billable requests straight to OpenAI, xAI or any compatible chat API ¹³. The traffic never touches the victim's application, so the site stays reachable while the account behind it empties, and nothing filtered at the site's edge stops it ¹². The attack class even has a name, denial of wallet ². The seller pitches it as a service for kneecapping rivals' chatbots and "Jarvis-style systems," and notes that automatic top-ups keep the charges running after the balance hits zero ²³.

Grok sits on both sides of the trade

The botnet's own persistence is outsourced to AI. An "AI stealth" module calls xAI's Grok to choose repairs from a predefined list, startup entries, scheduled tasks, Windows Defender exclusions, with local fallbacks when a model call fails; the operator enables it by pasting an xAI key into the build ¹³. The same vendor's model keeps the malware installed while its API is a named target of the drain. Grok 4.7 lists at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output↗ ⁴, and every drain request bills the key owner at rates like those.

The meter has already run once

In March, attackers stole an API key↗ from METR, the nonprofit that evaluates frontier models, and spent three weeks consuming credits worth about $600,000 ⁵⁶. Nobody noticed, because METR legitimately burns enormous token volumes and had no caps on spend ⁵. The credits had come free from the model provider, so METR paid nothing ⁶.

The fix is a spending cap, not a firewall

Qrator's guidance is dull and effective: revoke exposed keys, set spending limits, control automatic top-ups ²³. Its own caveat matters more: anyone holding a valid key could script this without a botnet, and the advertised protection-bypass modes carry no test results ². The platforms built the meter, priced the tokens and left the keys cheap. Watch whether spend caps become a default rather than an option.