Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

**Executive summary:** Federal agents arrested Ethan J. Foltz in August 2025 for operating "Rapper Bot," an IoT-based DDoS botnet of tens of thousands of devices that conducted hundreds of thousands of attacks (over 370,000 between April and August 2025), generated multi-terabit-per-second floods (commonly >2 Tbps, with some attacks exceeding 6 Tbps), and was rented to extortionists to coerce victims to pay to stop attacks; investigators tied the botnet to Telegram/PayPal/Google account records and noted reuse of fBot/Mirai-derived code and exploitation of IoT vulnerabilities to expand infections.