Feds Charge Iranians for Hacking 144 US Universities

Federal investigators have charged 9 Iranians for stealing troves of academic and intellectual property information from 144 universities and dozens of private companies in the US.

"The defendants stole enquiry that cost those universities $3.4 billion to procure and maintain," Us deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said in a Friday printing conference.

The 9 suspects nabbed over 31 terabytes of data and fed it back to the Iranian military, according to the Section of Justice. Employing the hackers was the Mabna Institute, an Iranian authorities contractor founded by two of the suspects, Rosenstein said. The goal of the institute was to help Iranian universities gain admission to scientific research.

In total, 320 universities across 22 countries were attacked. The suspects also breached 47 individual companies, along with government offices like the US Department of Labor and the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee.

FBI Iranian Hackers

To steal the data, the suspects sent phishing emails to over 100,000 accounts from professors across the globe who tried to fool victims into handing over their sensitive password data. The emails did and then by claiming interest in the professor's enquiry and including links to related academic articles. However, certain links in the phishing emails actually led to an internet domain under the hacker's control, the Department of Justice said.

In one case clicked, the malicious cyberspace domains would display a website pretending to be the login folio for the professor's academy. The aim was to trick victims into thinking they had logged out from the university system. "If a professor then entered his or her login credentials, those credentials were then logged and captured by the hackers," the Section of Justice said.

Ultimately, the suspects compromised over viii,000 email accounts.

"The campaign started in approximately 2022, and has continued through at least December 2022," DOJ said. Information stolen included academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books. The suspects non only fed the stolen information to the Iranian military, but also sold the contents online through two websites at Gigapaper.ir and Megapaper.ir, the latter of which remains agile.

When targeting private companies, the suspects but collected email accounts of their intended victims and so gained access by typing in commonly used passwords.

Federal investigators said the Iranian instance was 1 of the largest state-sponsored hacking campaigns the Us had ever prosecuted. Only bringing the suspects to justice is another thing. All of them are now wanted men, but they reside in Iran, making chances of extradition slim.

It also means the suspects are gratis to continue hacking their victims, leading some security experts to question the effectiveness of Fri's indictment.

But federal investigators say the charges are intended to send a message to the suspected hackers. "These defendants are now fugitives from American justice, no longer complimentary to travel exterior Iran without risk of abort," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement.

"The just way they will see the exterior world is through their figurer screens, but stripped of their greatest asset —anonymity," he added.

In addition to the charges, the US Treasury Department is punishing the Mabna Establish and the nine suspects with sanctions that forbid anyone in the US from conducting financial dealings with them.