US State Department offers $10m for information on Iran cyber hackers

The United States State Department is offering up to $10 million for information on the whereabouts of six Iranian hackers responsible for cyberattacks on Israeli systems and American utilities last year.

According to a statement by the US State Department this week, it is seeking “information leading to the identification or location” of six Iranian officials reportedly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC), including its head and Commander in the corps’ Quds Force named Hamid Reza Lashgarian.

Accused of targeting industrial control systems such as the Vision series of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by the Israel-based company Unitronics, the individuals are reportedly part of CyberAv3ngers, a hacking group which, late last year, took credit for cyberattacks against Israeli PLCs and for compromising those PLCs’ default credentials across the US.

Aside from leaving anti-Israel messages on the devices’ digital screens at the time, the US also condemns the group’s impact on various industries that rely on the PLCs, including water and wastewater, energy, food and beverage, manufacturing and healthcare.

Those operations led to the US imposing sanctions on the six individuals back in February this year over their “deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure”, with a US Treasury Department official having condemned the cyberattacks as “unconscionable and dangerous” and stated that Washington “will not tolerate such actions and will use the full range of our tools and authorities to hold the perpetrators to account.”

Read: Israel reports 3bn cyber-attacks on military systems since 7 October