According to the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, the US government has determined that the Iranian government is responsible for the hack and leak operation that targeted Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and also attempted to damage the Biden-Harris campaign. This information was released on Monday.
The FBI briefed the former president on their preliminary findings in recent days, following news reports that they had received documents purportedly from a top Trump campaign official’s account. The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has stated that the hackers’ attempts to harm the Biden-Harris campaign were unsuccessful.
According to US authorities, the inquiry is the most blatant indication of Iran’s and other nations’ attempts to sway the results of the 2024 election. “Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations said in a statement. “The Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. Should the U.S. government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence—if any—to which we will respond accordingly.”
Iran caught some US officials off-guard with how aggressive it was in trying to meddle in the 2020 election, including by threatening election officials. Four years later, the element of surprise may be gone, but Iran appears no less willing to try to cause chaos during the election, according to current and former US officials. In the recent hacking operation, investigators believe the suspected Iranian hackers in June breached the personal email account of longtime Trump ally and political operative Roger Stone, and then used that email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to access campaign networks, CNN previously reported.
In addition to the hack, an AOL account using the pseudonymous name “Robert” has leaked internal Trump campaign documents to media outlets, Politico first reported. One of those documents was a research file on Trump’s vice presidential running mate JD Vance, Politico reported.The FBI has studied email records provided by Microsoft, Google and AOL and has spoken to Trump campaign personnel to determine who was responsible for the hack and who was responsible for the leak, the sources said.
Attribution to the hack was fairly straightforward: The hackers’ techniques matched those of a notorious group affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).Some US officials were uncertain that the same IRGC-backed group that did the hacking had leaked the documents, according to two sources familiar with the matter, because the group is not known for leaks. However, investigators studying the AOL account have been able to link its digital infrastructure to the same Iranian hacking group, one of the sources said.
A person familiar with the email exchanges between “Robert” and reporters said that whoever was behind the account spoke halting English and pressured a reporter to publish more of the documents. The Iranian hackers have also targeted the email accounts of current US officials and people associated with Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden, researchers at Google said last week.
Source: Here
