WASHINGTON – The United States unveiled charges on Friday against nineIranians for their alleged involvement in a massive state-sponsored hackingscheme which targeted hundreds of universities in the US and abroad andstole “valuable intellectual property and data.”
Ten Iranians were also hit with sanctions along with an Iranian company,the Mabna Institute, which engaged in computer hacking on behalf of Iran’sRevolutionary Guards, the US Treasury Department said.
The two founders of the Mabna Institute, Gholamreza Rafatnejad, 38, andEhsan Mohammadi, 37, were among the nine Iranians indicted in New York andwhose assets are subject to US seizure.
Since 2013, the Mabna Institute carried out cyber intrusions into thecomputer systems of 144 US universities, the Treasury Department said, and176 universities in 21 foreign countries.
Mabna Institute employees and contractors “engaged in the theft of valuableintellectual property and data from hundreds of US and third-countryuniversities… for private financial gain,” it said.
“For many of these intrusions, the defendants acted at the behest of theIranian government and, specifically, the Iranian Revolutionary GuardCorps,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said.
The US Department of Labor, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,dozens of private firms and non-governmental organizations such as theUnited Nations Children’s Fund were also allegedly targeted.
Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, saidthe Iranians conducted spearphishing attacks designed to steal passwordsfrom email accounts in one of the “largest state-sponsored” hacking schemesever uncovered.
– 8,000 accounts compromised –
The email accounts of more than 100,000 university professors worldwidewere targeted, Berman said, and about 8,000 accounts were compromised.
He said 31 terabytes — about 15 billion pages — of academic data andintellectual property were stolen.
This included “research, and other academic data and documents, including,among other things, academic journals, theses, dissertations, andelectronic books,” the Justice Department said.