"A survey of 181 attendees at the 2012 Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas found that 36 percent of “information security professionals” said they’d engaged in retaliatory hack-backs."

What? Black Hat attendance is in the high thousands. A plurality of those attending are IT professionals --- people that wouldn't have the technical capability to take over a botnet even if they wanted to. Even if you broadened the definition of "hacking back", as some people do, to recon activities like port scans. No part of this anecdote makes sense.

For my part (I'm a security researcher by background, though that's not what I'm doing now, and I've presented at Black Hat numerous times): not only have I never met a professional who claimed to have "hacked back" anything, but I've never even met one who didn't think that was a crazy idea.

There is a difference between major organized efforts to bring down botnets and "hackback" the way the term gets associated with Endgame.