Exposing Secrets: Data Leak Hits Iran’s MOIS Training Academy

Future members of Iranian state intelligence have been outed in an anonymous data leak.

On Oct. 22, British-Iranian activist Nariman Gharib published a list of more than 1,000 people associated with the Ravin Academy to the open Web. Ravin Academy is a sanctioned Iranian cybersecurity school tied to the government’s umbrella advanced persistent threat (APT) group APT34 (aka MuddyWater, Helix Kitten, OilRig).

Gharib did not disclose any details about the means by which he obtained the data, though from context the attack smells of anti-Iranian hacktivism.

The victim suggested as much in a Telegram post obtained and translated by The Register. A statement copping to the breach suggested that “this incident, coupled with the repeated publication of false and misleading content in the past, has the goals of damaging the reputation of this academy, undermining security in Iran, and harming the standing of the National Olympiad in the field of cybersecurity.”

That latter clause refers to Ravin Academy’s “Tech Olympics” event currently running at Tehran’s Pardis Technology Park. According to local media, the event involved more than 12,000 participants from 66 countries, 1,100 of whom traveled to Tehran for the final round. Participants from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe have been competing in skills challenges related to artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, and more. The event appears to be significant in legitimizing Iran generally, and Ravin Academy specifically, as major players in the international technology sphere. “Given the media efforts over the past year to achieve the aforementioned goals, it is natural that the opponents and international competitors of this event seek to damage this great national achievement,” Ravin wrote.

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What Is the Ravin Academy?

The Ravin Academy was founded in November 2019 by two employees of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security’s (MOIS), Seyed Mojtaba Mostafavi and Farzin Karimi. Humorously, they registered their purportedly independent institution to an address just two city blocks from Iran’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the agency primarily responsible for implementing Iran’s oppressive Internet censorship. ICT is also critical to national cybersecurity, and plays support to the MOIS cyberattack operations.

Ravin Academy claims to be a regular cybersecurity training school. According to a variety of Western government and research organizations, it is in fact an MOIS project designed to train and funnel cybersecurity and hacking talent to the government.

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Multiple countries run or at least collaborate with falsely independent academic institutions. Doing so allows the government agency in the background to more effectively recruit talented young people, and claim plausible deniability when stories like this come out. Before the ties between state and school get outed, representatives of such institutions might enjoy access to international conferences and opportunities to collaborate on research projects.

School settings also allow for a variety of activities that would otherwise seem suspicious or offensive in a government context. For example, a school can provide a degree of ethical cover in teaching students how to hack computers.

PwC analysts outlined how that works in the case of Ravin Academy, in a report published in 2022. They described how in March 2020, Ravin Academy published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for CVE-2020-0688, a high-severity remote code execution (RCE) bug in Microsoft Exchange, to GitHub. On Sep. 23, 2020, a webinar from Ravin Academy demonstrated a PoC exploit for the critical Netlogon vulnerability, CVE-2020-1472. In a campaign during September and October 2020, MuddyWater was exploiting those two vulnerabilities, using the very same techniques outlined by the school.

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In sanctioning the school, the US Treasury Department wrote that “Ravin Academy assists the MOIS with a variety of cyber services, including information security training, threat hunting, cyber security, red team, digital forensics, malware analysis, security auditing, penetration testing, network defense, incident response, vulnerability analysis, mobile penetration testing, reverse engineering, and security research.” Ravin Academy has also earned sanctions from the UK and European Union (EU).

The Hackers of Iran (and also Ordinary Citizens)

The published Ravin Academy data includes more names, phone numbers, Telegram usernames, and national ID numbers. Gharib also obtained student ID numbers and information about the classes each student attended, but did not include this data in his leak site.

Reporters at The Register combed through the data, and discovered a couple of notable patterns. Firstly, a majority of the individuals they were able to identify did not come from cybersecurity backgrounds. Instead they were associated with other STEM fields, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, fluid dynamics, and machine learning (ML). If Ravin Academy is pulling talent from across industries, it might indicate the significance with which Iran is treating its national cyber operations.

More concerningly, reporters found that a number of named individuals were academics, of whom a “sizable subset” were associated with Western universities.

It’s also worth noting that because Ravin Academy doesn’t advertise its state ties to students, many of those named on Gharib’s leak site may not have known they were enrolled in a state-tied institution, and may never be employed by the Iranian government.

As Gharib put it, “This operational security failure undermines the company’s public credentials while simultaneously exposing individuals who enrolled in what they may have believed were legitimate professional development programs.”