New: Trump administration hits Iranian hacker network with sanctions, indictments in vast global campaign https://t.co/fdCPk4ZNff
— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) March 23, 2018
Of course, foreign espionage agents are always very bad news. But after Thursday’s press release, I can’t have been the only person hoping/fearing for a less… anodyne announcement:
The Trump administration on Friday announced sanctions and criminal indictments against an Iranian hacker network it said was involved in “one of the largest state-sponsored hacking campaigns” ever prosecuted by the United States, targeting hundreds of U.S. and foreign universities, as well as dozens of U.S. companies and government agencies, and the United Nations.
None of the alleged hackers were direct employees of the Iranian government, but all worked at the behest of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), officials said. While not the first such punishments imposed on Iran for such malicious acts, the new measures address more extensive Iranian efforts than previously alleged.
Nine of 10 named individuals were connected to the Mabna Institute, a Shiraz-based tech firm that the Justice Department alleged hacks on behalf of Iranian universities and the IRGC. The institute conducted “massive, coordinated intrusions” into the computer systems of at least 144 U.S. universities and 176 foreign universities in 21 countries, including Britain and Canada, officials said.
The hackers stole more than 31 terabytes of data and intellectual property — the rough equivalent of three Libraries of Congress — from their victims, prosecutors alleged. Much of it ended up in the hands of the IRGC, which has frequently been accused of stealing information to further its own research and development of weaponry. The Guard Corps is the division of Iran’s security forces charged with overseeing Iranian proxy forces abroad and is under the direct control of the country’s religious leaders…
The Trump Regency has gotten us into a very weird mindspace. Under normal circumstances, would one’s first thought be “Yes, yes, Mr. Bolton — those crafty Iranian terrorists, and their mad mullahs, always looking to DESTROY THE GREAT SATAN… “
Unintentionally (?) perfect coda:
… Also sanctioned was Behzad Mesri, who U.S. prosecutors announced last November had been indicted on a charge related to the hacking of HBO and theft of unaired episodes of programs including “Game of Thrones,” which the hacker threatened to release unless he was paid $6 million….
Ninedragonspot
Math question: is there a typo or is the library of Congress really only equivalent to 10 T of data? I’ve got more storage than that in various back-up external drives.
Edited: seems as though 10T too low by at least .a couple orders of magnitude. “So, here’s what I can say: the Library of Congress has more than 3 petabytes of digital collections. What else I can say with all certainty is that by the time you read this, all the numbers — counts and amount of storage — will have changed.”
Major Major Major Major
My policy is, distrust and don’t really bother verifying since ‘distrust’ is batting about .999 so far
@Ninedragonspot: 10 TB of curated text is a lot.
Major Major Major Major
@Ninedragonspot: yeah I’m sure their digital collection is enormous. Most people arrive at such figures by taking the number of books and doing rough math when they want a lazy number to compare whatever to.
Ninedragonspot
@Major Major Major Major: The galaxy is big, the universe is still bigger. The LOC is mind-bogglingly huge, especially when you consider all the archives there.
Joyce H
I saw a suggestion on another blog that the Iranian indictments did connect to Trump-Russia, we just can’t see it yet. Reasoning was that Sessions is such a glory hound he’d have made the announcements if he could, and since he didn’t, must be because it impinges on his recusal. Thought it was an interesting take, anyway.
Major Major Major Major
@Ninedragonspot: like I said, it’s a dumb lazy figure—seriously assuming they looked up “how many books loc” and “how many kb book” and multiplied. 39 million books * I guess 250kb per book.
ETA people don’t know how libraries work especially the LOC and journalists are people
Ninedragonspot
@Joyce H: the failed Trump Hotel Baku, with which Ivanka was also involved, apparently had some dealings with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The New Yorker ran an article on it last year.
Matt McIrvin
@Ninedragonspot: Are we counting just text or everything else in the LOC? The illustrations in the world’s books probably amount to immensely more information than just the text, expressed in some simple encoding. Or one could distinguish between the text and the image of the text as rendered in a book, and then talk about compression schemes.
Plain text takes up really very little space compared to just about any other kind of human accessible information, but you lose a lot that way.
Steeplejack
@Ninedragonspot:
Source of that quote?
Ninedragonspot
@Matt McIrvin: there are huge numbers of documents and manuscripts which would need digitization. 22 million pieces of music. Maps, periodicals, prints, photographs, sound recordings…
Ninedragonspot
@Steeplejack: blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/
Major Major Major Major
@Ninedragonspot: Let’s not forget like literally five years of all of Twitter.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeah, text takes up surprisingly little space. I’ve got a buttload of books on my Nook, and I don’t think the “space available” sign has budged off 99-100%.
ETA: But digitizing stuff so you can see the exact original pages, other digital collections, etc., would run up the total quickly.
hervevillechaizelounge
@Joyce H:
I assumed Sessions didn’t make the announcement so people would ASSUME (even subconsciously) the indictments tie into Russia, but really they’re just bullshit designed to muddy the waters of Russian hacking.
Tomorrow’s Fox talking points: how can you say Fuhrer Trump doesn’t care about foreign hacking when all those Mooslim hackers were indicted? And how can we really know Hillary wasn’t colluding with Iran to steal the election from herself?
I just assume everything the regime does is evil, incompetent, and/or lazy; at this point evil seems to be the best fit.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: it’s certainly safe to assume the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Every time I see a journalist get something so fundamentally wrong about something I know even a little about, it really makes me wonder about… every other thing presented as a fact.
mainmata
@Joyce H: Yes, that would be the only reason he wouldn’t go for that golden ring. Russia and Iran are on the same side WRT Syria, of course, both of whom are not BFF of the USA, of course. So, connection to the 2016 Trump Campaign? Hard to say, unless some of the Russian money being laundered by Trump and company was somehow related to an Iran-Russia connection.
We’ll soon see, won’t we.
Steeplejack
As a former journalist, I will offer the weak excuse that sometimes a writer can get taken by experts overhyping their case.
“The hackers took 10 terabytes of data!”
[Insufficiently impressed response from reporter.]
“That’s like three Libraries of Congress!”
Well, all righty, then!
Not excusing it, though.
NotMax
From 2013 (emphasis added).
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Sounds like there’s one go-to source somewhere who really likes that 10 terabyte number.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: 39 million books times 250kb. Nice round number too.
Have you read The Influencing Machine? It talks about how the media just loves these “Goldilocks numbers” that show up again and again and nobody knows where they came from.
Sm*t Cl*de
@NotMax:
“10 terabytes” is an estimate, so of course Matthew Aid divides it by 1028 and gives the answer to seven significant figures. Clearly a reliable source!
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
It might even be accurate, depending on how people define exactly what it is they’re counting. But all too often that gets lost behind the snappy money quote of, e.g., “three Libraries of Congress!”
I’ll check out The Influencing Machine. Sounds right up my alley. Although if I expand my pedant brief to cover numeracy I might get ridden out of Balloon Town on a rail.
Frankensteinbeck
I have no problem with this announcement. A major foreign hacking plot is important news. We should hear about it, and even a big dramatic announcement is justified. The Russia investigation will prefer to be kept as quiet as possible until they’re ready to hit the big boys. Even then, they may prefer to just send it to trial and announce nothing so as to corrupt a process less that will already be burdened by politics.
JR
@Ninedragonspot: Most user generated data, like most human-generated things throughout history, is worthless.
Matt McIrvin
Holy god, I basically avoided Twitter for three years, and recently I bothered for some reason to reactivate my account, and one of the people I followed before now basically posts nothing but Berniebro posts bashing “shitlibs” from the “left”, mostly Hillary Clinton and anyone who says anything positive about Hillary Clinton but any Democrat will do. He seemed intelligent before. Did I change or did he?
…I mean, I have another friend who links to Corey Robin and the Intercept a lot but he actually has incisive and varied things to say, it’s not so one-note.