A group of hackers from Iran stole millions of documents, including intellectual property, and offered the hacked papers for sale. The affected universities are Oxford and Cambridge, The Telegraph reports.

Infiltration of the elite British academic institutions comes ahead of a new round of sanctions against Tehran due to be imposed in November.

British papers are being bought and sold on Farsi-language websites for as little as £2. To purchase the stolen documents, customers in Iran send an encrypted message to a phone number using apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. They’re told to give the specific title of the paper they’d like to purchase, and then instructed to make a payment via a bank transfer. Once the payment is received by the site’s operators, a copy of the stolen paper is then emailed to the customer.

A spokesman for Edinburgh University said that hackers obtained passwords creating fake websites which appeared to students to be legitimate pages for library access.

Source » crimerussia