Iranian Hackers Targeted US Political Campaigns, Says Microsoft
This incident followed a similar breach of a county-level US official’s account just weeks earlier, Reuters reports.
Microsoft researchers revealed on Friday that hackers linked to the Iranian government attempted to compromise the account of a senior official involved in the US presidential campaign in June.
This incident followed a similar breach of a county-level US official’s account just weeks earlier, Reuters reports.
According to the researchers’ report, these incidents are part of a broader effort by Iranian groups to influence the upcoming US presidential election in November.
However, the report did not provide further details about the targeted official. This news comes after senior US intelligence officials warned of Iran’s increased use of covert social media accounts to spread political discord in the US.
In response, Iran’s UN mission in New York stated that its cyber capabilities are solely defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces, denying any plans to launch cyber attacks.
“The U.S. presidential election is an internal matter in which Iran does not interfere,” the mission added in response to the allegations in the Microsoft report.
“A group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” and “another group with assessed links to the IRGC compromised a user account with minimal access permissions at a county-level government,” the report said.
According to Microsoft researchers, the hacking attempts appear to be part of a larger effort by Iranian groups to gather intelligence on US political campaigns and target key swing states in the upcoming election.
The researchers revealed that the county employee’s account was compromised in May as a result of a “password spray operation”, a tactic where hackers systematically try commonly used or previously leaked passwords on multiple accounts until they successfully gain access to one.
This suggests a widespread and indiscriminate approach to breaching accounts.
The hackers weren’t able to access any other accounts through that breach and the targets were notified, the report added.
The researchers also said another Iranian group had been launching “covert” news sites that used artificial intelligence to lift content from legitimate news sites, and targeted U.S. voters on opposite sides of the political spectrum. It named the two sites as Nio Thinker — a left-leaning site — and a conservative site called Savannah Time.
