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US government officials announced criminal indictments against nine Iranian nationals last week (March 23), charging them with hacking the computers of 7,998 professors around the world on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s national security force. Of the professors whose data were compromised, 3,768 are at US universities. The indictment alleges that the hackers obtained more than 30 terabytes—about 15 billion pages—of documents and data, including scientific research, dissertations, and journals.
“Today, in one of the largest state-sponsored hacking campaigns ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, we have unmasked criminals who normally hide behind the ones and zeros of computer code,” Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a press conference announcing the indictments (via The ...
