Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service
Summary: A 22-year-old Springfield, Oregon man, Ethan J. Foltz, was arrested on August 6, 2025 on suspicion of operating "Rapper Bot," a botnet of an estimated 65,000 hacked IoT devices that the Justice Department says was rented out to online extortionists. The complaint states Rapper Bot ran attacks typically above two terabits per second and some exceeding six, including a March 10, 2025 DDoS that caused intermittent outages on Twitter/X, and that from April 2025 to early August it conducted over 370,000 attacks against 18,000 unique victims across 1,000 networks.
Why it matters: The complaint says Foltz wiped user and attack logs roughly once a week, so investigators could not tally the total number of attacks, customers and targets - and the DCIS investigator estimated a single 2+ terabit, 30-second attack could cost a victim $500 to $10,000, leaving victims exposed to "pay X dollars and the DDoS attacks stop" extortion.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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