Google on Tuesday confirmed that Iran-backed hackers were targeting the campaigns of US presidential rivals Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
A hacker group called “APT42” linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was targeting high-profile individuals and organizations, including government officials and political campaigns in Israel and the United States, according to a threat report released by Google.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign said on Tuesday that her campaign had been targeted by foreign hackers, just days after her rival Donald Trump’s campaign said his campaign had been hacked by Iran.
“In July, the campaign’s legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor’s influence operation,” a Harris campaign official told AFP.
“We have robust cybersecurity measures in place and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems as a result of these efforts.”
The report said Google’s threat analysis group has seen failed attempts by APT42 to compromise the personal accounts of President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris, and individuals associated with Trump.
, Phishing ,
The hacking group employs “phishing” attempts to collect information about targets and trick victims into giving them log-in details for accounts such as Gmail.
Examples cited in the report include posing as think tanks or other trusted contacts and directing victims to fake video meeting landing pages that require log-in credentials to participate.
While hackers have a plethora of technical tools available to them, some hackers choose “social engineering” tactics, tricking people into clicking on fake links or logging into virtual replicas of legitimate web pages.
Google said it thwarted APT42 attempts to hack the Biden and Trump campaigns in 2020.
According to the report, the Iranian hacker group’s targets in May and June this year included personal email accounts of about a dozen people associated with Biden or Trump and Google blocked several attempts by APT42 to log into their accounts.
Google also said the group broke into the personal Gmail account of an influential political consultant.
“APT42 is a sophisticated, persistent threat actor, and they show no signs of stopping their efforts to target users and adopt new tactics,” Google said.
“This spring and summer, they have demonstrated the ability to conduct multiple phishing campaigns simultaneously, particularly focused on Israel and the United States.”
Google is urging individuals with high-risk concerns related to the upcoming election to be vigilant and take advantage of the advanced security offered by the internet company.
The US State Department on Monday warned Iran of consequences for interfering in the election, as the Trump campaign declared it had been hacked.
The Trump campaign has suggested that Iran was behind the breach, which resulted in private documents being sent to reporters, including research the campaign used to investigate fellow candidate J.D. Vance.
It warned the media against reprinting the documents, saying doing so would be “acting at the behest of America’s enemies.”
The tone was a departure from 2016, when Trump said at a news conference that he hoped Russia would “find” Hillary Clinton’s emails, remarks widely seen as encouraging further hacking of his election rival.
US intelligence concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to support Trump, but Trump has rejected that conclusion.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
