Two Iranians indicted in Saint-Louis for “cryptojacking” of the Saint-Charles company | Law and order

ST. LOUIS – Two Iranian nationals have been indicted by the U.S. District Court in St. Louis and charged with hijacking computers to mine for cryptocurrency, prosecutors said.

Danial Jeloudar and Saeeid Safaei were charged Wednesday with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the US prosecutor’s office said. Both are believed to be living abroad, they said.

Richard Quinn, chief of the St. Louis bureau of the FBI, said in a statement that this was the first case of cryptojacking to be prosecuted in eastern Missouri. Cryptojacking involves taking control of a computer to generate or mine cryptocurrency, which requires significant electricity and computing power.

One of the victims is a Saint-Charles tech company, prosecutors said. The hackers misrepresented themselves as members of the company and tricked the company’s cloud service provider into installing at least five computer servers for the company to use. The company was billed more than $ 760,000 for the use of the servers, prosecutors said.

Officials recommended enhanced security practices to prevent or detect cyber crimes, including the use of two-step or two-factor authentication, cloud storage audits, and connection monitoring to quickly detect fraud. .