The Trump administration’s new roadmap for the cyber fight against “botnets” is an incremental but significant step toward defeating those armies of hijacked computers and devices — a threat identified by the White House as one of the most pernicious in cyberspace.

Botnets allow bad actors to launch denial-of-service attacks like the infamous 2016 assault on Internet service provider Dyn that temporarily knocked offline Twitter, Amazon, HBO and numerous other platforms and services across North America and Europe.