US Might Start A Nuclear War... Because Iranians Wanted Access To Academic Papers Locked Behind A Paywall?

from the seems-a-little-harsh dept

You probably saw one of the many stories about the US government charging nine Iranians with "conducting massive cyber theft campaign on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps", as the Department of Justice put it in its press release on the move:

"These nine Iranian nationals allegedly stole more than 31 terabytes of documents and data from more than 140 American universities, 30 American companies, five American government agencies, and also more than 176 universities in 21 foreign countries," said Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. "For many of these intrusions, the defendants acted at the behest of the Iranian government and, specifically, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Department of Justice will aggressively investigate and prosecute hostile actors who attempt to profit from America's ideas by infiltrating our computer systems and stealing intellectual property. This case is important because it will disrupt the defendants' hacking operations and deter similar crimes."

That certainly sounds pretty serious, not least because some believe the US government may use this is a pretext for military action against Iran, possibly involving nuclear strikes. But what exactly did those Iranians allegedly steal?

The members of the conspiracy used stolen account credentials to obtain unauthorized access to victim professor accounts, which they used to steal research, and other academic data and documents, including, among other things, academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books.

That is, they "stole" things like "academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books" -- you know, the stuff that professors routinely publish as part of their work. The stuff that they desperately want as many people to read as possible, since that's how ideas spread, and academic credit is assigned. So rather than some "massive cyber theft" on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is this not actually a bunch of people making copies of academic materials they and others want to read? We already know that Iranians have a particular hunger for academic knowledge of exactly this kind. An article published in Science in 2016 analyzed who was downloading unauthorized copies of scientific papers from Sci-Hub. Here's one striking result:

Of the 24,000 city locations to which [Sci-Hub downloaders] cluster, the busiest is Tehran, with 1.27 million requests. Much of that is from Iranians using programs to automatically download huge swaths of Sci-Hub's papers to make a local mirror of the site, [Sci-Hub's founder] Elbakyan says. Rahimi, the engineering student in Tehran, confirms this. "There are several Persian sites similar to Sci-Hub," he says. "So you should consider Iranian illegal [paper] downloads to be five to six times higher" than what Sci-Hub alone reveals.

Given that concentration of downloads from Sci-Hub in Iran, it's almost surprising the accused needed to break into US universities at all. The Department of Justice press release says that this activity has been going on since 2013, so maybe Iranians hadn't turned to Sci-Hub at that point. And perhaps there was other information they were seeking that was not available on Sci-Hub. A surprisingly precise figure of 31 terabytes in total is mentioned: how, exactly, was that calculated? After all, making copies of documents does not remove them, and people who break into systems tend not to leave notes about what they have "exfiltrated". It's hard to escape the feeling that 31 terabytes is simply the total amount of data they could have copied with all the credentials they obtained, and is used in the press release to make the incident sound bigger than it really is in order to justify any subsequent bellicose actions.

Of course, however much of whatever material was downloaded, breaking into other people's systems and accounts using stolen credentials is never justified. It's likely that the 8,000 compromised email accounts exposed a great deal of highly-sensitive personal information, which would arguably be a much more serious matter than the fact that journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books were downloaded.

Still, this story doesn't really seem to be about 1337 Iranian government haxxors trying to undermine the US university system with a "massive cyber theft", as the over-the-top press release rather implies. It's more a bunch of unscrupulous individuals using fairly simple phishing techniques to get their hands on otherwise unavailable academic material, apparently to sell to others, at least according to the Department of Justice. It also suggests that if more of this academic work were freely available under open access licenses for everyone's benefit, rather than locked up behind paywalls, there would be less of an incentive for people to engage in this kind of illegal behavior. To say nothing of less risk of a nuclear war.

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Filed Under: cyber theft, cybersecurity, doj, hacking, iran, islamic revolutionary guard, open access