Qihoo 360: The botnet attacking platform X is the same organization that attacked DeepSeek during the Spring Festival

ChainCatcher news, according to an analysis by Qihoo 360 Xlab, the large-scale cyber attacks that caused three outages on the X platform are attributed to the same main botnet that attacked DeepSeek during the Spring Festival. This botnet is known as the Mirai variant botnet RapperBot, which belongs to a "professional thug" type of attack organization.

Qihoo 360 Xlab discovered that the attack times perfectly matched the downtime of the X platform, primarily concentrated between 10 PM on March 10 and 2 AM on March 11 Beijing time. This botnet has been active for years, attacking hundreds of targets daily on average, with thousands of commands issued during peak periods. The attack targets are distributed across regions including Brazil, Belarus, Russia, China, Sweden, and others. The scale and intensity of this attack directly led to three significant service interruptions on the X platform, with a peak of 20,538 users reporting issues on March 10, Eastern Time.