Iranian Citizens Charged in Broad Hacking Campaign in US | Hacker News Reader

Iranian Citizens Charged in Broad Hacking Campaign in US

insurancejournal.com

67 pointshassanahmad32 comments

Pretty unremarkable story if not for the nationalist implications. Turns out there might be at least 3 hackers (and possibly up to 13!) doing ransomware in Iran.

Was this the thing the Albanian government was pissed about at the Iran state?

I doubt it, I think that was when someone released the entire Albanian social security (maybe some other department) database.

13!, so 6227020800 hackers? That’s a lot!

Are Iranian hackers an actual threat? Or is threat being overstated for propaganda? It's a genuine question, please don't start a flame war.

Ransomware is an actual threat. The fact that it can originate in Iran doesn't necessarily mean that it is more dangerous than ransomware from anywhere else.

Propaganda

how is this being overstated? It's fairly neutral toned story being published in a highly specific trade journal.

Individual hackers of minimal skill are a threat to the IT infrastructure used by every organization in the US, so yes. If you mean is there a differential danger relative to other potential threats, then no.

My interpretation of your statement is that organizations in the US don't care about security and do the bare minimum to secure their systems, if anything at all

Sounds accurate, sadly

>in the US

honestly it seems that nobody cares about it, carelessness is not limited to the US sadly

That is a correct interpretation.

Why should they care if even massive customer data leaks have little effect on market capitalisation?

Sounds like a job for regulators

> is threat being overstated for propaganda?

In the insurance journal?

As someone who works in insurance, I'm not clear about the implication of your comment.

This is a pretty quantitative industry.

any sales-based industry is suspect in this way, though.

This is an AP story reprinted by insurance journal, see https://apnews.com/article/technology-iran-violence-new-jers...

No, obviously it’s “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” [0] /s

[0] - https://www.engadget.com/2016-09-30-wanted-one-400-lb-hacker...

My mother runs a healthcare center that had a ransomware attack from Iranian hackers during the pandemic. For a few days during the peak of the pandemic their IT systems stopped working and it impacted operations. I think it was a common practice to wait for an opportune crisis to strike. That probably resulted in more people dying from the pandemic.

The actual context here is a thwarted attack on Boston's Children's Hospital. The FBI is angry, and they intend to hunt these 'hackers' down:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/cybersecurity/3-irania...

Judging by the names these are the same people?

Here's the actual DOJ press release:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-iranian-nationals-charg...

The compromised machines call home to domains registered to the defendants in their own names. This is either state level incompetence or script kiddies gone wild.

Or parallel construction.

it takes two minutes to read enough the article to know, it was contractors to State-level intelligence, doing side business as ordinary ransomware. As others say, this hardly seems to be a story at all, very common.. on all sides.

This is basically unreadable. The whole article is forced to the right side of the page and only a single word per line (current Firefox/Mac). It then floats on top of the right sidebar categories leaving 9/10ths of the screen as white space.

I'm also using FF Mac and it looks like a normal news site to me (centered max-width container)

Thankfully Reader Mode fixes it.

Iranian state-related hackers broke into a NJ accounting firm?

How many instances of this happen every day? Also what are the actual chances of the hackers going to jail given they're state-related?

On a larger scale, why doesn't the DoJ just prosecute every Russian solider? They're accomplices to war crimes and murder after all.

All this will read in a few hundred years after the collapse of the US empire to be utter hubris. Like Hannibal whipping a river. Or old medieval states digging up dead people to behead them again. It's just the US state screaming into the void.

Did you read the article? The justice department is claiming they specifically are not state sponsored attacks.

Also mentioned in the article the ramifications for the individuals, it’s near impossible for them to leave Iran and they have been sanctioned financially.

Why is this a story? Like most countries that are still around, Iran will retaliate when it's attacked.

It's a story any time one country hacks another and the public finds out about it. There's very little "retaliation" in the grand scheme of things today; more long on-going conflict with no end among shifting ideologically opposed opportunists.

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