Federal prosecutors unsealed criminal charges Friday accusing nine Iranians of orchestrating years of cyberattacks on behalf of the Iranian government to steal data from hundreds of universities and businesses in the U.S. and abroad, in one of the largest state-sponsored hacking cases ever charged by the Justice Department.
Prosecutors say the defendants stole more than 31 terabytes of data for financial gain. Among the victims were 144 American universities, 36 American companies and five American government agencies, including the U.S. Labor Department....
Prosecutors say the hackers stole data and intellectual property across all fields of research, including science, technology, engineering and medical fields.
The stolen materials and login credentials were obtained for the IRGC’s benefit and sold to public universities in Iran, U.S. officials said. One service allowed customers in Iran to directly access online library systems of certain U.S. universities.
Prosecutors said universities had paid a
total of $3.4 billion to access the academic materials that the hackers had accessed for free.
Prosecutors said the hacking campaign lasted from 2013 through at least late 2017.
The defendants—Gholamreza Rafatnejad, Ehsan Mohammadi, Abdollah Karima, Mostafa Sadeghi, Seyed Ali Mirkarimi, Mohammed Reza Sabahi, Roozbeh Sabahi, Abuzar Gohari Moqadam and Sajjad Tahmasebi—are at large overseas and haven’t been arrested. The U.S. doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Iran.