A new report from Microsoft Corp. claims that Iranian hackers have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over the past two years.

Allegedly state-sponsored, that is using hackers employed by the Iranian government, the hacking campaign is said to have targeted thousands of people in more than 200 companies. They stole corporate secrets and deleted data, the latter seemingly out of spite. Targets included companies in the U.S. as well as in Saudi Arabia, Germany, India and the U.K.

Microsoft attributed the attacks to a group it dubbed Holmium but has previously been referenced by security researchers as APT33. APT stands for advanced persistent threat, a common reference to organized, usually state-sponsored hacking groups.

“These destructive attacks… are massively destabilizing events,” John Lambert, head of Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center, told The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal said the new attacks are among several linked by researchers over the past year to hackers in Iran, a country claimed to be aspiring to join Russia and China “as one of the world’s premier cyber powers.”

Iran has previously been both a perpetrator and victim of hacking. In November, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two Iranian men who were allegedly behind the creation and distribution of the SamSam ransomware.

Following a Federal Bureau of Investigation warning in December, Oussama El-Hilali, vice president of Arcserve LLC, told SiliconANGLE at the time that “SamSam has been a highly profitable form of ransomware, particularly in the healthcare sector, which is notorious for being vulnerable to these kinds of attack.”

Iran has also been targeted by organized, likely state-sponsored hacking as well. Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm believed to have been created in 2005 but first detected in 2010, was allegedly designed to cripple Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons. A new variant appeared in November with claims that it successfully hit infrastructure and strategic networks in the Islamic republic.

“They’re definitely sharpening their skills and moving up their capabilities,” John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, told the Journal. “When they turn their attention back to the United States, we may be surprised by how much more advanced they are.”

Photo: adam_jones/Flickr