Federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced a superseding 14‑count indictment that accuses 17 individuals tied to the Iran‑based Mabna Institute of conducting a multi‑year cyber‑theft campaign against universities, private companies, and government agencies worldwide. The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York before Judge Jesse M. Furman, expands on a 2018 case by adding eight new defendants.
Scope of the theft
According to court filings, the hacking group exfiltrated more than 31 terabytes of academic research, intellectual property and proprietary email records from 2013 through late 2017. Investigators say the operation targeted more than 100,000 email accounts belonging to professors, ultimately compromising roughly 8,000 accounts at 144 U.S. universities and 178 institutions abroad, including schools in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Japan and Switzerland.
U.S. universities reportedly spent over $3.4 billion to purchase the journals, dissertations and research files that the hackers stole. The stolen material spanned engineering, medicine, technology and the social sciences. After extracting the data, the defendants transferred it to overseas servers and made it available for purchase through two Persian‑language websites, Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, where customers inside Iran could buy direct access to compromised university library networks.
Corporate and government targets
The indictment also details breaches of employee accounts at 42 U.S. companies and 11 foreign firms, as well as intrusions into five U.S. federal and state agencies and international bodies such as the United Nations, UNICEF, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Among the private‑sector victims was Home Box Office (HBO), where defendants allegedly attempted to extort millions of dollars in Bitcoin. Separate corporate intrusions generated more than $20 million in investigation and cleanup costs for the affected firms.
State sponsorship
Prosecutors allege that the group acted on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other Iranian government clients. The Mabna Institute was founded around 2013 by Gholamreza Rafatnejad and Ehsan Mohammadi with the explicit goal of obtaining unauthorized access to non‑Iranian scientific data.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said the National Security Division is committed to protecting the United States from “predators” who steal valuable research and intellectual property. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald emphasized that the charges demonstrate the government’s resolve to pursue cyber adversaries, noting that “cyber operations have become a central instrument of national power.”
Law‑enforcement response and rewards
FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman warned that the agency’s “memory is long” and that time will not blunt its resolve to bring the hackers to justice. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the location of five of the charged defendants.
The indictment was prepared in coordination with the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, underscoring the international cooperation required to combat state‑sponsored cyber threats.
Original reporting: Tampa Free Press — read the source article.
