AWS, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and Google helped Feds investigate alleged Rapper Bot DDoS perp

Infosec in brief PLUS

The US Department of Justice has thanked Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, Flashpoint, Google, PayPal, and Unit 221B for their assistance in an investigation that last week led to charges against an alleged operator of the Rapper Bot denial-of-service network.

Oregon resident Ethan Foltz, 22, was formally charged by the Feds for running the network, which ran over 370,000 attacks over the last four months. It’s alleged Foltz wrote and administered malware that used up to 95,000 infected machines to launch traffic-flooding attacks, many of them WiFi routers and digital video recorders.

According to the charges, Foltz offered his services to take down portals and had enough slaved systems to launch attacks at up to six terabits per second. Typically, it's said, he charged between $500 to $10,000 for a two terabit per second attack lasting 30 seconds or ...