Academic thieves using phishing websites eye American universities the most with the University of Washington as their most frequent target, according to Kaspersky Lab.

The big picture: Stealing academic research and intellectual property via hacking is a very real problem as nine Iranians were indicted for such a scheme in March. Kaspersky tracked attacks using lookalike webmail portals to steal email credentials for 131 universities in 18 countries. 11.6% of the attacks were targeted at UW — almost as much as the next two universities, Cornell (6.8%) and the University of Iowa (5.1%), combined.