"Paras Jha, Dalton Norman and Josiah were also a part of this normal Minecraft server entrepreneur game until they decided to force players from other servers on to theirs by clogging their networks. Therefore, Mirai came into existence and started performing for them very well. However, Mirai started outperforming the creator’s expectations, affecting the Internet outside Minecraft badly."
"The creators of Mirai found potential in the botnet and therefore went on to fine-tune it to improve its abilities. They even started leasing Mirai to other cybercriminals, who used them around the world for their own vested interests."
Malware can be reasonably described using evolutionary mechanism (similar to Memetics), AVs and best practises create a evolutionary pressure in which only the fittest and most aggressive malware can win out. A lot of things in computer science and/or on the internet behave in ways not to dissimilar to evolution
From an evolutionary perspective it's not that different from any start-up that pivoted from it's original goal after finding out it's real effectiveness. The only difference is the criminality of the activity.
"Paras Jha, Dalton Norman and Josiah were also a part of this normal Minecraft server entrepreneur game until they decided to force players from other servers on to theirs by clogging their networks. Therefore, Mirai came into existence and started performing for them very well. However, Mirai started outperforming the creator’s expectations, affecting the Internet outside Minecraft badly."
"The creators of Mirai found potential in the botnet and therefore went on to fine-tune it to improve its abilities. They even started leasing Mirai to other cybercriminals, who used them around the world for their own vested interests."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware)
"Upon infection Mirai will identify "competing" malware and remove them from memory and block remote administration ports."
From an evolutionary perspective its an interesting example of 'fitness'