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The hackers also are accused of breaking into the networks of dozens of government organizations, such as the Department of Labor, the United Nations and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and companies including law firms and biotechnology corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Justice Department said the hackers were affiliated with an Iranian company called the Mabna Institute, which prosecutors say contracted since at least 2013 with the Iranian government to steal scientific research from other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBy bringing these criminal charges, we reinforce the norm that most of the civilized world accepts: nation-states should not steal intellectual property for the purpose of giving domestic industries an advantage,\u201d Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in announcing the charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also Friday, the Treasury Department targeted the Mabna Institute and 10 Iranians \u2014 the nine defendants and one charged in a separate case last year \u2014 for sanctions that will bar them from doing business in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The defendants are unlikely to ever be prosecuted in an American courtroom since there\u2019s no extradition treaty with Iran. But the grand jury indictment \u2014 filed in federal court in Manhattan \u2014 is part of the government\u2019s \u201cname and shame\u201d strategy to publicly identify foreign hackers, block them from traveling without risk of arrest and put their countries on notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The strategy has been employed with past indictments accusing Iranian hackers of a digital break-in of a New York dam, Chinese military officials of large-scale hacks at energy corporations and Russians of a massive breach of Yahoo user accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople travel. They take vacations, they make plans with their families,\u201d said FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich. \u201cHaving your name, face and description on a \u2018wanted\u2019 poster makes moving freely much more difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the indictment, the Iranians broke into universities through relatively simple, but common means \u2014 tricking professors to click on compromised links. The spear-phishing emails purported to be from professors at one university to those at another and contained what appeared to be authentic article links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But once clicked on, the links steered the professors to a malicious Internet domain that led them to believe they had been logged out of their systems and asked them to enter their log-in. The credentials were then logged and stolen by the hackers, prosecutors say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From there, according to the Justice Department, the hackers stole roughly 15 billion pages of academic research and intellectual property that was then sent outside the United States for profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than 100,000 professors worldwide were targeted with spear-phishing emails, and the information that was stolen cost U.S. universities about $3.4 billion to procure and access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJust in case you\u2019re wondering, they\u2019re not admiring our work,\u201d Bowdich said. \u201cThey\u2019re stealing it, and they\u2019re taking credit for it, and they\u2019re selling it to others.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Iranian defendants are accused of working at the behest of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to steal large quantities of academic data as well as email accounts belonging to employees of government agencies and private companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":39829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"8":{"categories":["home","daily-brief","newsletters","it-cloud-report","doj-fbi"],"primary_category":"doj-fbi"}}},"categories":[106,29,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[5435],"class_list":["post-13605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"LQOP5MLHN5BGHACXQBVFKFGKP4","arc_canonical_url":"\/civilian\/fbi-doj\/2018\/03\/23\/justice-dept-charges-9-iranians-in-massive-hacking-scheme\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n