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Couldn't they just query outgoing transactions from the wallet?

The estimates given also do not factor transaction fees (currently 0.00041 BTC ~= 25 USD) , the estimated costs are only in value given to the attacker.

For this specific botnet continuous denial of service also doesn't make sense. The attacker could easily setup an upgrade at an ip that chooses a different public address.

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I don't think they owned the wallet, so they couldn't make outgoing transactions. I assume they didn't want to use a wallet they did control in case it could be used to identify them.

It just seems like a very thin layer of plausible deniability, in the current setup they control wallets that send the transactions that also can be linked back to them.

Agreed, I think they didn't really put much thought into it. Their next version will look at only outgoing transactions. They could also use another coin for lower transaction fees.

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