Montenegro arrests Iranian wanted in $3.4 billion US hacking case

Montenegro’s police directorate arrested a 39-year-old man with dual Iranian and Turkish citizenship in the Adriatic resort town of Kotor on Thursday, placing him into extradition proceedings that will now go before a High Court judge in Podgorica. U.S. prosecutors in New York are seeking him on charges including conspiracy to commit computer fraud, hacking and identity theft.

The case reaches back more than a decade. The hacking campaign began in at least 2013 and targeted more than 150 universities in the United States. The broader U.S. case ties stolen data and access to compromised university accounts to the benefit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian entities, including universities.

The 2018 Justice Department indictment laid out the scale of the operation in detail. It accused nine Iranian nationals and the Tehran-based Mabna Institute of carrying out a coordinated cyber theft campaign that hit 144 U.S. universities, 176 universities in 21 foreign countries, 47 private-sector companies, and U.S. government bodies including the Department of Labor and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The hackers stole more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property, and the department put U.S. universities’ spending at about $3.4 billion to obtain and access research that had been taken.

In 2018, the action brought charges against nine Iranian citizens and sanctions from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control against the Mabna Institute and the defendants. In April 2024, the Justice Department charged four other Iranian nationals in a separate multi-year cyber campaign that targeted more than a dozen American companies and the Treasury and State Departments.