Iran was behind a recent cyber attack on Donald Trump's presidential campaign, US security agencies said on Monday, accusing Tehran of trying to influence the 2024 election.
The statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed the Trump campaign's claim earlier this month that it had been attacked, potentially by Iran.
“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns,” the security agencies said.
“This includes recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump's campaign, which (the intelligence community) attributes to Iran,” they said.
The US goes to the polls on November 5, and both Trump's campaign and that of his rival Kamala Harris say they have been targeted by cyberattacks in recent weeks. US-based technology companies have also said they have detected such attacks.
The U.S. intelligence community was “confident” that Iran had used social engineering and other methods to target individuals in both political campaigns, and that the efforts were “intended to influence the U.S. electoral process,” according to Monday's statement.
The Trump campaign said on August 10 that it had been hacked and blamed “foreign sources” for distributing internal communications and a dossier on his running mate JD Vance.
“These documents were illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States, with the intent to interfere in the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
The Trump campaign suggested Iran was behind the move, with media outlet Politico reporting it had received emails containing campaign material from a source who declined to be identified.
Harris' campaign was targeted
Cheung cited a Microsoft report this week that said Iranian hackers “sent a phishing email in June to a senior official in a presidential campaign.”
The materials received by Politico included inquiries into the evaluation of Vance, Trump's pick for vice president.
In 2016, a hack of Democratic National Committee emails — blamed on the Russians — exposed internal party communications, including those about candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump, who would later win the election, was criticized for encouraging the hack.
Democratic presidential candidate Harris' campaign said on August 13 that she had also been targeted by foreign hackers, but gave no indication of which country was believed to be behind the attempt.
“In July, the FBI notified the campaign's legal and security teams that we were the target of a foreign actor influence operation,” a Harris campaign official said. AFP Agency.
Google said this month that Iran-backed hackers were targeting the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns.
A hacker group known as APT42, linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted high-profile individuals and organizations in Israel and the United States, including government officials and political campaigns, according to a threat report published by Google.
Google's threat analysis group continues to detect failed attempts by APT42 to compromise personal accounts of people affiliated with Biden, Harris and Trump, the report said.
