US Man Accused of Running One of the World’s Most Powerful Botnets

A 22-year-old man from the US state of Oregon is said to have stood behind one of the most powerful well-known bot nets. Now the alleged operator of the “Rapper Bot” network was officially charged.

Numerous attacks

According to the Ministry of Justice, the accused could threaten up to ten years in prison in the event of a conviction for aid to computer attacks Wall Street Journal. The accused has not yet been commented. The botnet consisted of tens of thousands of hijacked devices – including routers, surveillance cameras and digital video recorder. With this infrastructure, the accused website of its victims is said to have flooded with massive data streams. Among other things, an attack hit the social network X, which was then unavailable for some time.

Measurements of the Nokia network supplement showed the dimension of the attacks in February: In an attack on a gaming platform, the experts registered data streams of 6.5 trillion bits per second – one value that exceeds the capacity of conventional internet lines many times over. According to the indictment, Rapper was one of the strongest DDOS networks per documented.

According to investigators, technology companies in the USA, Asia and Europe were particularly affected. A total of more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries were recorded. In addition to X and the Chinese Ki company Deepseek, networks of the US Department of Defense are also being attacked several times.

For rent

In addition, the accused is said to have rented the bot network against payment. Among other things, customers were operators of gaming pages who put competitors under pressure or started extending blackmails. Experts have been warning of the growing danger from bot nets for years, which mostly consist of uncertain IoT devices.

While large cloud services can fend off the attacks, smaller companies or government institutions quickly reach their limits. “The shutdown of rapper offered one of the most important sources for the greatest attacks that we are watching,” said Jérôme Meyer from the Nokia Deepfield network analysis service.