In the US, nine Iranians are charged with “a coordinated campaign of cyber intrusions into computer systems”. Australian universities are among the hundreds of higher education institutions targeted. But which ones? The US Department of Justice is not saying but given the Iranians allegedly sought to steal IP unis with big research reps are the obvious targets.

Like the University of Queensland; “we believe that UQ may have been a target of this group on several occasions over the past few years,” Chief Information Officer Robert Moffatt said yesterday.

But despite making off with what the DoJ says is 31 terabytes of data and documents it seems that the cyber thieves were neither ambitious or effective. “Their activities centred around the attempted theft of academic journals through the library journal subscription service and not the attempted theft of UQ research data.”

“All incidents that we suspect may have been attributable to the Iranian group were low key and quickly dealt with,” Mr Moffatt says.