U.S. Department of Justice: Accuses Iranian hackers of breaching HBO's website and stealing academic data

According to Decrypt, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed charges against 17 hackers allegedly affiliated with Iran's Mabna Institute, accusing them of participating in years-long cyber attack activities, including the 2017 breach of U.S. cable network HBO, where they stole data and demanded approximately $6 million in ransom paid in Bitcoin. Prosecutors claim that the organization conducted hacking attacks on behalf of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian government clients, targeting hundreds of universities, businesses, and government agencies worldwide, stealing at least 31.5 TB of academic data and intellectual property.

The organization also targeted over 100,000 professor accounts, breaching about 8,000 accounts across 144 U.S. universities and 178 foreign universities. The U.S. State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the whereabouts of five of the defendants. In recent months, the U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on several Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges and frozen over $131 million in cryptocurrency assets related to the Iranian central bank and the Revolutionary Guard.