Ddos 
The U.S. Department of Justice has recently charged 22-year-old Oregon resident Ethan Foltz with operating a massive botnet, known as RapperBot or Eleven11bot, and leveraging it to conduct large-scale cyberattacks.
This botnet, composed of tens of thousands of infected routers, IP cameras, and digital video recorders, was primarily weaponized for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which Foltz allegedly rented out to paying clients.
Investigations revealed that many of these clients used the botnet for extortion campaigns. For instance, one renter launched sustained assaults against online gambling platforms, threatening to cripple their operations unless ransom payments were made, thereby inflicting severe financial losses through prolonged service disruptions.
According to compiled data, RapperBot has executed more than 370,000 attacks targeting corporations and institutions across over 80 countries and regions worldwide. Notable victims included Elon Musk’s social media platform X/Twitter as well as several U.S. government agencies.
The Chinese cybersecurity firm Qi An Xin previously reported that in February 2025, RapperBot orchestrated an attack against the AI platform DeepSeek, causing significant service slowdowns during the incident.
However, court filings released by the Department of Justice redacted portions of the identified target list, strongly suggesting that RapperBot may also have been deployed against critical U.S. infrastructure or other sensitive institutions. The precise motives behind these particular attacks remain unclear.
Cyber adversaries often strike high-profile companies for notoriety and prestige, using such spectacles as a form of advertisement to attract new clients. The assaults on X/Twitter and DeepSeek appear to align with this pattern—calculated demonstrations designed to enhance the botnet’s reputation and broaden its customer base.
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