Three Iranians have been charged with trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from organizations in the United States, Europe, Iran and Israel, including a domestic violence shelter, by hacking in to their computer systems, US officials said on Wednesday.
Other targets included local US governments, regional utilities in Mississippi and Indiana, accounting firms and a state lawyers’ association, according to charges filed by the justice department.
While the criminal charges do not say whether the alleged hackers worked for the Iranian government, a separate US treasury department statement said the hackers were affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an Iranian intelligence and security force.
And just last week, the US imposed sanctions on Iran’s ministry of intelligence and its minister, accusing them of being tied to a disruptive July cyber-attack on Albania and engaging in other cyber activities against the US and its allies.
A senior official said on Wednesday that Iran’s government does not discourage residents from engaging in hacking, as long as it is directed outside the country.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The defendants, named as Mansour Ahmadi, Ahmad Khatibi and Amir Hossein Nikaein, are citizens of Iran who own or are employed by private technology companies in the country.
The treasury also imposed sanctions on the three Iranians, as well as several other individuals and two organizations they said were part of Tehran’s “malicious” cyber and ransomware activity.
The alleged hackers face little chance of being arrested, as they are believed to be living freely in Iran. But officials said the charges will make it difficult for them to travel or find work outside the country.
According to the charges, the three men infiltrated the computer systems of a wide range of businesses and governments between October 2020 and August this year, encrypted their data and demanded bitcoin payments of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Some victims, including the domestic violence shelter, opted to pay the ransom to recover their data.
Such ransomware attacks have grown dramatically over the past decade, damaging scores of US companies and other organizations around the globe. Earlier this month, hackers infiltrated the systems of Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in the US. And in July, the US government warned that hospitals across the US have been targeted by an aggressive ransomware campaign originating from North Korea since 2021.
In June last year, the justice department said it was elevating ransomware investigations to a similar priority to terrorism in the wake of a major, disruptive attack on a US pipeline company, which led to localized gas shortages on the US East coast.