Oregon Man Accused of Operating One of Most Powerful Attack 'Botnets' Ever Seen

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been charged with operating one of the most powerful botnets ever recorded. The network, known as Rapper Bot, launched over 370,000 DDoS attacks worldwide, including against X, DeepSeek, U.S. tech firms, and even Defense Department systems. It was allegedly operated by Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Oregon. The Wall Street Journal reports: Foltz faces a maximum of 10 years in prison on a charge of abetting computer intrusions, the Justice Department said in a news release. Rapper Bot was made up of tens of thousands of hacked devices and was capable of flooding victims' websites with enough junk internet traffic to knock them offline, an attack known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS.

In February, the networking company Nokia measured a Rapper Bot attack against a gaming platform at 6.5 trillion bits per second, well above the several hundred million bits a second of the average high-speed internet connection. 'This would place Rapper Bot among the most powerful DDoS botnets to have ever existed,' said a criminal complaint that the prosecutors filed Tuesday in a federal court in Alaska. Investigators said Rapper Bot's attacks were so powerful that they were able to overwhelm all but the most robust networks.

Foltz allegedly rented out Rapper Bot to paying customers, including gambling website operators who would use the network in extortion attempts, according to the complaint. The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said. It launched its attacks from hacked routers, digital video recorders and cameras, not from computers. 'At its height, it mobilized tens of thousands of devices, many with no prior role in DDoS,' said Jerome Meyer, a researcher with Nokia's Deepfield network-analysis division. 'Taking it down removes a major source of the largest attacks we see.'

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