The computing world has seen an explosion in the open source hardware project space. Companies like Arduino, GumStix, Bug Labs and Marvell have not only made consumer hardware projects easy and affordable, but they’ve also made it nearly mainstream. My talk will explore this movement’s affect on information security through the concept of using cheap, ultra compact hardware in the development of hardware botnets. I will demo the PlugBot Project — a hardware botnet research project of mine. The PlugBot project consists of hardware devices (“bots”) that are made up of ultra compact ARMprocessor servers, about the size of a power adapter, equipped with WiFi, SATA HDD, Ethernet and Bluetooth. The Bots are intended to challenge physical security measures as well as technical security measures all the while providing a would-be attacker with the tools and computing power to covertly exploit their victim. They run Debian along with a host of well-known security tools.