An industrial espionage operation hit one of the world’s tech giants, leading to the arrest of three Iranian citizens accused of stealing highly confidential information.
At the center of the investigation conducted by U.S. federal authorities are two sisters, former Google employees, and the husband of one of them.
According to documents filed by the Department of Justice, the three suspects allegedly orchestrated a conspiracy aimed at seizing technologies critical to processor security and the complex cryptography underlying the devices.
In particular, the stolen information would concern the development and operation of the Tensor processors, the proprietary microchips that power the devices of the Pixel series.
The FBI’s investigations highlighted how part of this valuable material was transferred outside the corporate boundaries, reaching unauthorized servers and even arriving in Iran.
FBI arrests three people, former Googlers allegedly exfiltrated Tensor chip secrets
Samaneh Ghandali, a 41-year-old hardware engineer, and her 32-year-old sister Soroor, previously employed as an intern, allegedly exploited their own access to begin data exfiltration.
Together with Mohammadjavad Khosravi, Samaneh’s husband and an employee of another tech company after having been rejected by Google on several applications, they allegedly set up a real exfiltration network.
The group demonstrated notable care in evading basic cyber controls: instead of always proceeding with simple direct downloads that would have triggered immediate alarms, they preferred to photograph the screens of the company’s computers.
The data were then carried via third-party messaging platforms and temporarily stored on personal devices.
When they realized the suspicions were closing in, the suspects took swift actions to hide their tracks, destroying physical evidence and giving false statements.
The internal discovery and legal consequences
Despite evasive techniques, Google’s monitoring and internal defense systems managed to isolate the anomalous file movements, allowing the company to intervene promptly and immediately alert the FBI.
Investigative leaders described the three’s conduct as a grave breach of corporate trust, underscoring the urgent need to protect U.S. intellectual property from any attempt at illicit theft or espionage.
The defendants, appearing before the federal court in San Jose, California, now face fourteen counts ranging from trade secret theft to conspiracy, up to obstruction of justice.
If convicted on the more serious charges, penalties could be extremely severe, with the defendants facing up to twenty years of imprisonment in a federal penitentiary.
