A brand new group calling itself Hezi Rash (Black Drive in Kurdish) has emerged as a rising energy within the world of hacktivism, based on the most recent analysis report from Examine Level’s Exterior Threat Administration.
This nationalist collective, reportedly established in 2023, makes use of cyberattacks, primarily DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service), to focus on international locations seen as threats to Kurdish or Muslim communities.
Targets and Ways
Examine Level’s analysis staff, led by Cyber Risk Intelligence Analyst Daniel Sadeh, discovered that Hezi Rash views itself as a digital defender of Kurdish society and ties its operations on to political and spiritual points. They state their objective is to be a “Kurdish nationwide staff working to assist and defend Kurdish society.” The group is energetic on Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and X (previously Twitter).
Their major weapon, the DDoS assault, works by flooding a web site with overwhelming junk site visitors, inflicting it to crash. The group has claimed duty for assaults around the globe, together with:
- Japan – 23.5%
- Türkiye – 15.7%
- Israel – 14.6%
- Germany – 14.2%
- Iran – 10.7%
- Iraq – 7.5%
- Azerbaijan – 5.7%
- Syria – 4.3%
- Armenia – 3.9%
Notably, they retaliated towards Japanese anime websites over a burning Kurdish flag depiction and focused Israeli platforms throughout the #OpIsrael marketing campaign, displaying the robust function of nationwide symbols and Islamic hacktivist narratives of their motivation.
Researchers documented roughly 350 DDoS assaults linked to Hezi Rash between early August and early October, which is a considerably greater quantity than what is often seen from different hacktivist teams of an analogous measurement in the identical timeframe.
Key Alliances
Additional probing revealed that Hezi Rash doesn’t brazenly share its actual strategies, nevertheless it clearly depends closely on highly effective alliances. The group is linked to different well-known hacktivist collectives reminiscent of Keymous+, Killnet, and NoName057(16).
This community permits Hezi Rash to probably entry capabilities from DDoS-as-a-Service (DaaS) platforms like EliteStress, that are rental companies permitting customers with little technical experience to launch assaults.
Additionally they use instruments like Abyssal DDoS v3, developed by Mr. Hamza, an anti-Israel hacktivist group. Since these collaborations are sometimes constructed on mutual achieve over shared ideology, the rise of Hezi Rash highlights hacktivism’s shift towards rented DaaS instruments, making political disruption simpler and them a persistent concern.
To mitigate this menace, organisations are suggested to implement robust defences, together with utilizing DDoS mitigation companies, deploying Internet Software Firewall (WAF) problem pages, and intently monitoring for site visitors spikes from residential IPs.
