Washington offers 10 million dollars to arrest 3 Iranian hackers What's the story?

The United States has offered a reward of 10 million dollars to anyone who leads it to three Iranian hackers, who have targeted hundreds of entities around the world. For their part, the US Departments of State and Treasury said that the accused were hackers linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Washington announced Wednesday that it has offered a reward of $ 10 million for those who guide it to three Iranian hackers who are accused by the US judiciary of launching cyber attacks to collect ransom, noting that their attacks targeted hundreds of entities around the world, including a shelter for victims of domestic violence and a children's hospital.

According to the indictment published on Wednesday, Mansour Ahmadi (34 years), Ahmad Khatibi Aghda (45 years) and Amir Hossein Neqin (30 years) launched a series of cyber attacks targeting entities in the United States, Britain, Israel and Russia, as of October 2020. As well as inside Iran.

The indictment does not mention any connection to the Iranian government, and the FBI maintains that the defendants' "main" purpose in these cyber attacks was their personal enrichment.

However, the US Department of State and the Treasury confirmed that the three accused are part of a group of hackers "associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard".

And the two ministries announced in separate statements that they had imposed sanctions on the three accused, in addition to seven other Iranians and two Iranian companies.

The State Department has offered a reward of $10 million to anyone who helps arrest the three suspects.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the award "demonstrates our determination to prevent any ransomware cyber attack on our infrastructure."

For his part, a senior official in the US Department of Justice, who asked not to be named, said that the three suspects are likely in Iran.

The three men are accused of targeting hundreds of information networks around the world.

In the United States, their targets included small businesses as well as a power company, a children's hospital in Boston, municipalities, and the American Bar Association (ABA).

Each time, these hackers took advantage of flaws in the system to encrypt the data of their victims and demanded that they pay thousands of dollars in exchange for providing them with a decryption key.

Some of their victims agreed to pay the ransom, including a battered women's shelter in Pennsylvania, and paid $13,000 to restore and prevent their data from being disclosed.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a video message posted on the FBI website that the three defendants "performed hacking, information theft and extortion, primarily for personal gain."

The Iranian regime is often accused of being responsible for launching cyber attacks abroad, which it denies.

Albania's government recently severed ties with Tehran, accusing it of being behind a massive hacking campaign that first targeted its digital infrastructure and then its security services.