U.S. federal prosecutors have charged 17 Iranians in connection with a years-long campaign of cyber attacks, including an attempt to extort the television network HBO for $6 million in bitcoin.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday that the 17 individuals were working with the Mabna Institute, which carried out hacking campaigns on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian government and university clients. The campaign targeted hundreds of U.S. and international universities, dozens of companies, and at least five U.S. state and federal government agencies. The case began in March 2018, when prosecutors first charged nine hackers tied to Mabna and the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the institute and those defendants; the Justice Department described the operation at the time as one of the largest state-sponsored hacking campaigns it had ever prosecuted. In that earlier indictment, prosecutors said the conspiracy had compromised more than 100,000 professor accounts worldwide and stolen some 31.5 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property.

Part of the indictment named Behzad Mesri, who was previously charged with hacking entertainment giant Home Box Office — HBO — and stealing proprietary data. Mesri, who used the online alias "Skote Vahshat" and was first charged in November 2017 over the breach, was accused of taking scripts and unaired episodes of the series "Game of Thrones" before making his demand. The crime then saw Mesri attempt to extort approximately $6 million worth of Bitcoin. His demand came in 2017, a year in which other major extortion campaigns, including the WannaCry ransomware attacks, likewise called for payment in cryptocurrency — a pattern that has since become a recurring feature of hacking cases. Prosecutors added that five other defendants — Saeid Houshyar, Manouchehr Hashemloo, Keyvan Fayaz, Saber Shahbazi Ballojeh, and Arman Kahzadian — were directly involved in the hack.

The State Department's Rewards for Justice program is now offering up to $10 million for information on the location of the defendants, who are believed to remain in Iran. The United States has no extradition treaty with Iran, so indictments of this kind typically function as public accountability measures — exposing operatives and constraining their ability to travel outside Iran without risk of arrest — rather than as immediate paths to trial.

"Today's charges, which include eight additional defendants, reveal the broader network allegedly behind a sweeping, state-sponsored campaign to steal research and intellectual property from American universities, businesses, and government institutions," U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald for the Southern District of New York said in a statement.

Founded around 2013 by Gholamreza Rafatnejad and Ehsan Mohammadi, the Mabna Institute allegedly worked at the behest of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian clients. The stolen research did not go only to Tehran's intelligence services. According to prosecutors, it was resold through two websites, Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, the latter renting out hijacked professor logins so Iranian customers could walk straight into foreign university libraries.

U.S. institutions had spent some $3.4 billion acquiring the material in the first place. Separately, victims racked up more than $20 million cleaning up the breaches.

This article, written by Mathew Di Salvo, first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.