US Department of Justice: Iran is accused of hacking the HBO website and stealing academic data

According to Decrypt, according to Decrypt, the US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against 17 hackers allegedly belonging to Iran's Mabna Research Institute, accusing them of participating in cyber attacks over several years, including hacking into the US cable network HBO in 2017, stealing data, and then demanding that the other party pay a ransom of about 6 million US dollars in Bitcoin. The prosecution alleges that the organization carried out hacking attacks on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and other Iranian government clients, targeting hundreds of universities, businesses, and government agencies around the world, stealing at least 31.5 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property rights.

The organization also targeted over 100,000 professors' accounts around the world and hacked about 8,000 accounts at 144 American universities and 178 foreign universities. The US State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million to collect the whereabouts of 5 of these defendants. The US Treasury recently imposed sanctions on a number of Iranian crypto exchanges and frozen over $131 million in crypto assets linked to Iran's central bank and Revolutionary Guard Corps.