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Security Government United States

US Charges Iranians For Global Cyber Attacks on Behalf of Tehran (reuters.com) 36

The United States on Friday charged nine Iranians and an Iranian company with attempting to hack into hundreds of U.S. and international universities, dozens of companies and parts of the U.S. government on behalf of the Tehran government. From a report: The cyber attack pilfered more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from 144 U.S. universities and 176 universities in 21 foreign countries, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. The U.S. Treasury Department said on its website that it was placing sanctions on those accused and the Mabna Institute, a company described by U.S. prosecutors as designed to help Iranian research organizations steal information.
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US Charges Iranians For Global Cyber Attacks on Behalf of Tehran

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Iran has never used nerve agent to assassinate someone and contaminate a British town.

    They also haven't hacked our election systems, unlike Russia.

    More importantly, they never bribed Moscow Donald to betray his own country.

    • Right? This is basic intel gathering. Every nation on Earth with an economy has teams doing this.

    • The Russians are accused of hacking the DNC not the US elections! Only idiots think they hacked the US elections! Tim S.

      Iran has never used nerve agent to assassinate someone and contaminate a British town.

      They also haven't hacked our election systems, unlike Russia.

      More importantly, they never bribed Moscow Donald to betray his own country.

    • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

      They also haven't hacked our election systems, unlike Russia.

      Neither has Russia. Plot hole #3,459 of Russiagate is the fact that both parties in the United States have been virulently anti-Russian for over a century. It's like accusing Malcolm X of interfering in an election between Strom Thurmond and George Wallace - both people hated his guts so why would he bother??

  • How were they able to hack so many universities? I wonder if this is fallout from the Snowden leaks revealing all the backdoors in legacy systems.

    • ? University networks are insecure af in my experience. Too much wild west, lots of students involved in setting up networks, student support, etc.

  • The cyber attack pilfered more than 31 terabytes of academic data.

    I hate it when media quantifies dammage in terms of bytes... bytes of what? I can fit 31TiB in my desk draw, at little cost. The significance of the size entirely depends on what it is... is it 31 TiB of academic security footage? or decades worth of research? reducing qualatative dammage information to these kinds of numbers looses all relevance, much like that kid who looked over his techers shoulder to see his password who was charged with "computer missuse act".

  • The USA, NSA and Five Eyes regularly intercepts traffic, hacks communication, puts back doors in commercial devices and even modifies other countries hardware. I find it hard to charge intelligence operatives of other countries for doing something we do ourselves. Your morals have to be pretty messed up to make one a crime and encourage the other.
  • >US Charges Iranians For Global Cyber Attacks on Behalf of Tehran

    This makes it sound like the US is doing Tehran a favour by doing some of their legal work for them.

  • Expect the Trump admin to kill off the Iranian deal (even the Prez can't say why its actually bad) - I think that comes up within a month. Would not be surprised if this the beginning of the drumbeat for regime change by this administration.
  • Sometimes the headline makes me have to do a triple reading. I read that and thought to myself, "How much are we charging for these cyber attacks?" As in a monetary value. Then I figured out "charged with crimes". The English language sucks....
  • Nothing like the early echo of wardrums in the morning.

  • Brazilian prosecutors, follow this example and charge the US staff involved in the cyber attacks against Petrobras and Brazilian government on 2014/2015
  • A fascist regime bent on fermenting discord anywhere on the planet, the united States of America. I figure what with the Russians not responding to the neocon bait, they have to pick a fight elsewhere.
  • Even if this isn't just more propaganda from the usual pathological liars, [youtube.com] the U.S. is hardly in a position to complain here after deliberately sabotaging Iran's civilian centrifuges.

    If Iran had done that to the United States, we would have invaded their asses a long time ago.

  • Yeah, Iranian universities, etc. cannot access most of the high end academic journals eg. publications of the IEEE. There's an embargo or some such. So some enterprising types likely figured it would be easy to just download a bunch of stuff à la Aaron Swartz or Alexandra Elbakyan and liberate it in to Iran (possibly for profit). Kind of a non-event in that light isn't it? They got caught and there's a big anti-piracy/anti-Iran lobby so this makes news ... kinda.

"The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do." -- Gregory Bateson

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