Shadow force: The secret history of the U.S. intelligence community's battle with Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Shadow force: The secret history of the U.S. intelligence
community's battle with Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Once the actual professors
clicked on these links, they were redirected to what seemed to be the login
page for their universities, making it appear they had somehow inadvertently
signed out. But the login page was fake. And once the professors entered their
usernames and passwords, the information was captured by the hackers, who then
had free rein over their accounts.
This wasn’t the work of
run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. In March 2018, federal prosecutors in New York
unsealed a shocking indictment: nine Iranians, prosecutors said, working on behalf
of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had undertaken a “massive,
coordinated” hacking campaign that targeted hundreds of universities across the
globe, including 144 based in the United States, as well as private U.S. and
European companies, U.S. federal agencies and state governments, and the United
Nations.
From at least 2013, these
IRGC-sponsored hackers tried to infiltrate about 50,000 academic email accounts
in the United States, said prosecutors, and successfully compromised roughly
3,700 of them. The hackers allegedly stole $3.4 billion in intellectual property
and academic data from U.S.-based universities alone in “one of the largest
state-sponsored hacking campaigns ever prosecuted by the Department of
Justice,” said Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of
New York, at a press conference announcing the charges.
Many countries have military and
intelligence agencies that operate abroad, but few are as far-reaching or
prolific as the Revolutionary Guard, which has been involved in everything from
conducting espionage campaigns in Europe and the Americas to supporting proxy
forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
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