Acknowledging the spies on campus
Marc S. Reisch · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2018
In late March, the U.S. Justice Department indicted nine Iranians and accused them of breaking into the computer systems of 144 U.S. universities and 176 foreign universities in 21 countries. The hackers worked at the Mabna Institute, an Iranian government-sponsored body set up in 2013. Its purpose, prosecutors said, was to help Iranian universities, scientific organizations, and research groups steal access to non-Iranian scientific resources. Between 2013 and 2017, the hackers waged a phishing campaign targeting more than 100,000 academic email accounts. They succeeded in compromising the accounts of about 8,000 professors, prosecutors said. The hackers then allegedly used the pilfered credentials to steal research and other academic data, such as journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books. The hackers’ shopping list included information in all fields of academic research. Prosecutors calculated the value of the pilfered research to U.S. universities at about $3.4 billion. In all, they said, the hackers