The Justice Department on Wednesday announced charges against three Iranian individuals alleged to have launched cyberattacks against the US and critical global infrastructure, Politico reported. 

After the U.S. Department of Justice charged three Iranian hackers yesterday with trying to blackmail organizations in the United States, Europe, Iran, and Israel, including a shelter for victims of domestic violence and a children's hospital, by hacking into their computer systems to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars, Washington announced a 10 million reward. 

The State Department offered a reward of ten million dollars to anyone who helped it arrest the three defendants, who are Mansour Ahmadi (34 years), Ahmed Khatibi Agdah (45 years), and Amir Hossein Neqain (30 years).

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stressed that this award "demonstrates America's determination to prevent any ransomware cyberattack targeting its infrastructure."

On condition of anonymity, a senior official in the U.S. Department of Justice said that the three accused are likely in Iran, AFP reported.

As of October 2020, the three defendants launched a series of cyber-attacks targeting entities in the US, Britain, Israel, and Russia, as well as inside Iran, according to the indictment of the U.S. Department of Justice published yesterday, Wednesday.

Their targets included small businesses, a power company, a children's hospital in Boston, municipalities, and the American Bar Association (ABA).

Some of their victims agreed to pay the ransom, including a battered women's shelter in Pennsylvania, which paid $13,000 to restore and prevent its disclosure.

As for how they could penetrate this, the investigations revealed that each time, they deliberately exploited 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.

In a tweet on the FBI's Twitter account, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Christopher Ray said in a video message that "the Director announces the indictment of three Iranian nationals for their roles in a multi-year scheme to compromise the networks of hundreds of companies, organizations, and institutions."

He also confirmed that the FBI had published an alert about "the broader threat posed by cyber-activists linked to Iran," noting Canada, Australia, and Britain also adopted the warning.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Departments of State and the Treasury confirmed that the accused are part of a group of hackers "associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard." The department added that they had imposed sanctions on them, in addition to seven other Iranians and two Iranian companies. 

Iran is accused of being responsible for launching cyber-attacks abroad. A few days ago, the last attack of this kind was when the Albanian government announced that it had cut ties with Tehran, accusing it of being behind a large-scale electronic hacking campaign that targeted its digital infrastructure and security services.