DDoS attacks ramped up by new Hezi Rash hacktivist operation

HackRead reports that the newly emergent Kurdish hacktivist group Hezi Rash has conducted almost 350 distributed denial-of-service intrusions around the world from August to October, making it more active than other hacktivist operations during the same period.

Nearly a quarter of the Hezi Rash's DDoS attacks were aimed at Japan as part of retaliatory efforts against Japanese anime sites showing scenes burning the Kurdish flag, according to Check Point researchers. Turkiye, Israel, Germany, and Iran were the next most common targets of Hezi Rash.

Hezi Rash, which is active on X, TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram, has leveraged connections with well-known hacktivist collectives NoName057(16), Killnet, and Keymous+ to harness EliteStress, Abyssal DDoS v3, and other DDoS-as-a-service (DaaS) platforms in their attacks.

Mounting use of DaaS tools among hacktivist operations should prompt organizations to bolster their defenses by implementing Web Application Firewall challenges, DDoS mitigation services, and more stringent residential IP traffic monitoring, researchers said.