US blames Iran for Trump campaign hack

• The agencies claim that Iran is attempting to influence the 2024 election.
• The US intelligence community is confident that Iran used social engineering 
• Trump’s campaign reported a hack on August 10,

US security agencies announced on Monday that Iran was behind a recent hack targeting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, accusing Tehran of trying to influence the 2024 election. 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 earlier claim that Iran was potentially responsible for the breach.

“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 the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the (intelligence community) attributes to Iran,” they said.

In response, Iran’s mission to the United Nations denied involvement in the hack and challenged Washington to provide evidence for the claim.

“Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” the mission said in a statement.

“As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the US presidential election.

“Should the US 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.”

The United States will go to the polls on November 5, with both Trump’s and Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s campaigns reporting recent cyberattacks. US-based tech companies have also detected these attacks.

On Monday, the US intelligence community said it was “confident” that Iran used social engineering and other methods to target individuals in both campaigns, with the attempts aimed at influencing the US election process. On August 10, Trump’s campaign reported a hack, attributing the breach to “foreign sources” that distributed internal communications and a dossier on running mate J.D. Vance.

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The Republican former president’s campaign suggested Iran was behind the hack after Politico reported receiving emails with campaign material from an anonymous source. Cheung referenced a Microsoft report from this week, which revealed that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” The materials Politico received included research on vetting J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential pick.

In 2016, hackers, allegedly Russian, exposed internal Democratic National Committee emails, including details about candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump, who won the election, faced criticism for encouraging the hack. Harris’s campaign revealed on August 13 that it had also been targeted by foreign hackers but did not specify which country was believed to be behind the attempt.

“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation,” a Harris campaign official told news.

This month, Google reported that Iranian-backed hackers were targeting both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns. The hacker group 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. Google’s threat analysis group observed ongoing, unsuccessful attempts by APT42 to breach personal accounts of individuals associated with Biden, Harris, and Trump.

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