The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has just leveled sanctions against ten (10) Iranian individuals in connection with state-sponsored ransomware and cyber espionage campaigns targeting entities in the US and across the globe. After extensive campaign investigations as part of a joint action with the Department of Justice (DoJ), Department of State (DoS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), National Security Agency (NSA), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the ten (10) individuals were identified as employees/associates of the Iranian-based Najee Technology and Afkar System companies, both of which have been sanctioned. The organizations and individuals have been connected with high confidence to Iran’s notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The sanctioned threat actors have been attributed to malicious cyber campaigns going back at least two (2) years after investigators and researchers identified overlaps in the tactics techniques and procedures (TTPs) of Iranian state-sponsored hacking groups like Charming Kitten (APT35) and Phosphorus (DEV-0270, Nemesis Kitten, Cobalt Mirage). The threat actors have been charged with compromising the networks of businesses and critical infrastructure of US and Middle Eastern defense industries, government personnel, and private industries such as media, energy, business services, and telecommunications. The sanctioned threat actors have been observed exploiting software vulnerabilities in order to deploy ransomware as well as conducting cyber espionage activity such as gaining persistent access, moving laterally across target networks, and exfiltrating sensitive data. All ten (10) of the individuals are banned from doing business in the US, and three (3) of the men were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey for their participation in a devastating New Jersey ransomware attack, as well as hundreds of other attacks across the US. If brought to the US, all three (3) could face twenty (20) years in prison, and the US DoS has placed a $10 million bounty on each individual. These sanctions are the response to a sharp uptick in Iranian threat actor activity over the course of 2022, and CTIX analysts will continue to monitor the movements of known threat groups to provide readers with timely and actionable threat-intelligence.