March 24, 2016 - The US Justice Department has indicted seven Iranians connected to the country's government with cyber-attacks on a host of major banks.

A grand jury in the Southern District of New York indicted seven people who were employed by two Iran-based computer companies, ITSecTeam and Mersad Company, that performed work on behalf of the Iranian Government, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The seven face computer hacking charges related to a 176 day-long campaign of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that targeted 46 American financial institutions - including Bank of America, Nyse and JPMorgan - between late 2011 and mid-2013.

The attacks saw bank sites knocked out, preventing customers from accessing accounts and collectively costing the victims tens of millions of dollars, says the DoJ.

The men are accused of building botnets to carry out the attacks, which during their heaviest days, saw victim computer servers hit with as much as 140 gigabits of data per second and hundreds of thousands of customers were cut off from online access to their bank accounts.

Ahmad Fathi, Hamid Firoozi, Amin Shokohi, Sadegh Ahmadzadegan, Omid Ghaffarinia, Sina Keissar, and Nader Saedi all face up to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit and aid and abet computer hacking. Firoozi faces a further five years for gaining access to the systems of the Bowman Dam in New York state.

The accused are not in US custody, but at a press conference Attorney General Loretta Lynch argued that fugitives are often brought to justice eventually and that the indictments also send a strong message to other potential hackers.

"In unsealing this indictment, the Department of Justice is sending a powerful message: that we will not allow any individual, group, or nation to sabotage American financial institutions or undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market," says Lynch.