Nine Iranians indicted by US for hacking to steal research data
Today, the Department of Justice announced charges against nine Iranian nationals connected to the Mabna Institute, a company which an FBI spokesman said was "created in 2013 for the express purpose of illegally gaining access to non-Iranian scientific resources through computer intrusions." The stolen data was largely acquired from universities, but academic journal publishers, tech companies, other private companies, government organizations, and the United Nations were targeted as well.
The hacking campaign was central to a line of business at Mabna Institute, which acts as a sort of pirated JSTOR for the Iranian academic and research community. Mabna, the indictment claims, "was set up in order to assist Iranian universities [and] scientific and research organizations to obtain access to non-Iranian scientific resources." In that capacity, DOJ attorneys claim, "The Mabna Institute contracted with Iranian governmental and private entities to conduct hacking activities on their behalf."
In addition to acquiring research that the US and other countries banned access to in Iran and providing it to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the principals of Mabna also sold both stolen research documents and access to hacked organizations' online libraries through Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir-websites controlled by Abdollah Karima, one of the principals of Mabna Institute. Over a four year period, Manba Institute is alleged to have gained access to computers at over 300 universities-roughly half of them in the United States-while gathering up a total of 31.5 terabytes of research data. Additionally, about 7,996 university accounts were compromised-about 3,768 of them at US universities.
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