I don't know the full background history of Monero, but I did join early on. I will give you and tactotime props for stepping in to save a project.

However, on the basis of what you have said about Darkcoin, you should offer up to coinmarketcap a similar desire to have Monero listed as premined / instamined because it was forked from BCN and the code contained depotimisation to rig the mining game, apparently.

You may not have known that, but its a fact that Monero miners were being ripped off. You took over the project because you suspected the dev was a scammer but you didn't relaunch.

Then you just discovered an issue post fact.

The issue may have been resolved, but it still stands. Monero was instamined for the best part of two months, or more.

"Bitmonero was a fork of Bytecoin designed to not have the 80% premine.  But its initial developer either didn't know, didn't care, or wanted to profit from the de-optimized hashing.  That initial developer was pretty quickly given the boot by the community, and in came an unrelated group of developers who took it over---who were, as far as I can tell, completely unaware of the deoptimization.  So things sat there for a few weeks in the same state as Bytecoin."

http://da-data.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html

You as one of the devs should have worked out there was a problem and not have been told about it but some kid who needed to get permission from his parents to keep spewing out hundreds of thousands of coins and dumping them for a profit.  Wait no, devs don't make mistakes.

Now you suspect a botnet attack, which could easily be more of the above.

You should offer this information up to coinmarketcap to demonstrate you are not just trying to attack the competition, but you genuinely want fair play.