The U.S. Department of Justice has unsealed new and updated charges against 17 Iranian nationals accused of participating in a large-scale cyber theft campaign targeting American universities, businesses and government agencies.
According to the DOJ, the suspects worked with the Mabna Institute, an Iranian organisation accused of conducting hacking operations on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), government bodies and universities.
Prosecutors said the campaign targeted hundreds of universities in the United States and abroad, dozens of U.S. companies and at least five state and federal government agencies.
The newly unsealed charges expand on an indictment first announced in 2018, which accused nine of the individuals of hacking targets including the U.S. Department of Labor, the United Nations and computer networks in Hawaii and Indiana.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jamie McDonald said the charges expose what authorities described as a broader network behind a state-sponsored effort to steal research and intellectual property from American institutions.
The DOJ alleges that the Mabna Institute had targeted more than 100,000 professor accounts worldwide since at least 2013, successfully compromising about 8,000 academic email accounts at 144 U.S. universities and 178 universities in other countries.
The U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice programme has offered a $10 million reward for information that could help locate several of the individuals named in the charges.
Iranian representatives at the United Nations in New York had not immediately responded to requests for comment.
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