Federal authorities have successfully dismantled one of the most formidable distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets globally and have charged its suspected administrator with orchestrating cyberattacks that affected victims in over 80 nations.
Ethan Foltz, a 22-year-old resident of Eugene, Oregon, has been indicted for allegedly managing the “Rapper Bot” botnet, also referred to as “Eleven Eleven Botnet” and “CowBot,” which has been executing complex DDoS assaults since at least 2021.
Key Takeaways
- An Oregon man, 22, faces 10 years in prison for operating a colossal DDoS botnet.
- Over 370,000 attacks executed across 80+ countries using between 65,000 and 95,000 compromised devices.
- The FBI seized control and halted the botnet on August 6, 2025.
Massive Scale of Cyberattacks Revealed
The Rapper Bot operation posed a significant hazard to the integrity of global internet infrastructure, harnessing between 65,000 and 95,000 infected devices to conduct catastrophic attacks.
Court filings disclose that the botnet primarily compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices, notably including Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and WiFi routers, through the deployment of specialized malware, effectively transforming these devices into unintentional participants in cyberattacks.
The scale of this operation was extraordinary, with investigators cataloging over 370,000 assaults directed at 18,000 distinct victims from April 2025 onward.
These DDoS attacks are frequently gauged between two and three terabits per second, with the most formidable assault potentially surpassing six terabits per second.
Such gargantuan attack volumes might inflict costs on victims ranging from $500 to $10,000 for a mere 30-second assault, excluding the ramifications of lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and expenses related to incident response.
This illicit enterprise capitalized on its nefarious services by granting paying clients access to what prosecutors characterize as “one of the most sophisticated and powerful DDoS-for-hire Botnets currently in existence.”
Targets of these attacks included essential infrastructure, such as U.S. government networks, leading social media platforms, and various technology firms.
Some clients reportedly utilized the botnet’s functionalities for extortion, leveraging the menace of expansive DDoS attacks to coerce victims.
On August 6, 2025, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) executed a search warrant at Foltz’s domicile, effectively neutralizing the botnet’s attack capabilities and seizing administrative control.
The disruption was part of Operation PowerOFF, an international law enforcement initiative aimed at targeting DDoS-for-hire infrastructures worldwide.
Collaborative efforts from industry partners, including Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Google, proved pivotal during the investigation.
Foltz confronts allegations of facilitating computer intrusions, which may lead to a potential sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.
This case exemplifies law enforcement’s expanding prowess in counteracting sophisticated cybercriminal enterprises that jeopardize global internet security and infrastructure.
Source link: Cybersecuritynews.com.
