U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said at a press conference that hackers have stolen the university’s research results and sold it to Iran for profit. Rosenstein said: “Academic institutions are prime targets for foreign cybercriminals. Universities can thrive as marketplaces of ideas and engines of research and development only if their work is protected from theft.”
Also on Friday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against Iranian hackers and joined another Iranian Behzad Mesri in prosecution, accusing him of negatively attacking HBO servers via the Internet and leaking unreleased “Game of Thrones” TV series last summer.
According to the Ministry of Justice, the “Mabna Hackers” organization also attacked the U.S. Federal Energy Commission, the Ministry of Labor and the United Nations, and 47 other private companies encountered their attacks. These attacks were made on behalf of the Iranian government.
Rosenstein said that overall, the research and development costs of the theft and sale of these universities by hackers amounted to $3.4 billion. Officials said that the organization was accused of stealing more than 31TB of university data, which was stolen by infiltrating college into a fraudulent email with a phishing link.
