Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of nine Iranians, for unauthorized computer access, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft, alleging a massive coordinated campaign to trick university professors into revealing their login credentials, and then using those credentials to download academic journal articles, theses, dissertations, and electronic books. Access to the papers was then sold, at two websites, megapaper.ir and gigapaper.ir.
I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever linked to a criminal indictment published at Science magazine. Their news coverage of the indictment is also better than the general news media articles I’ve read, or at least it wanders away from the specifics of the indictment a whole lot less.
Nine Iranians working on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hacked the computers of 7998 professors at 320 universities around the world over the past 5 years, an indictment filed by a federal grand jury alleges. The hackers stole 31.5 terabytes of documents and data, including scientific research, journals, and dissertations, the indictment alleges. Their targets also included the United Nations, 30 U.S. companies, and five U.S. government agencies.
The “massive and brazen cyber assault” is “one of the largest state-sponsored hacking campaigns ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York, where the indictment was filed, said at a press conference this morning. The hacks came to light through investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and reports from victims. “The hackers targeted innovations and intellectual property from our country’s greatest minds,” Berman said, adding that they went after data and research from many fields.
According to the indictment, 3768 of the hacked professors were at 144 U.S. universities, and the attackers stole data that cost these institutions about $3.4 billion to “procure and access.” The accused allegedly set up an institute in Iran called Mabna that coordinated and paid for the hacks. The defendants then sold the stolen data through two websites, Gigapaper and Megapaper. The institute, the indictment says, aimed to “assist Iranian universities, as well as scientific and research organizations, to obtain access to non-Iranian scientific resources.”
Massive Cyberhack by Iran Allegedly Stole Research from 320 Universities, Governments, and Companies, Jon Cohen, Science
Out of curiosity, I went to the megapaper.ir website, via Google translate. It’s a science paper search engine and repository, like JSTOR.
Here’s the main page, with a simple Google-like text box for searches:
Here’s the advanced search form. Google translate worked very well here.
And here’s an example search result, for a paper by title. It’s certainly spiffier looking than Google Scholar.