Iran Is Trying To Mess With The US Elections Says Microsoft
From the “why am I not surprised” department comes this from Microsoft. Researchers for Microsoft said that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a “high ranking official” on the U.S. presidential campaign in June:
“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.
It said the activity appeared part of a broader push by Iranian groups to gain intelligence on U.S. political campaigns and target U.S. swing states. It said the county employee’s account was breached in May as part of a wider “password spray operation” – one where hackers use common or leaked passwords en masse on many accounts until they can break into one.
The hackers weren’t able to access any other accounts through that breach and the targets were notified, the report added.
And that’s not all. It looks like Iran is trying to use other means to bend the US election in ways that help Iran:
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.
When browsed on Friday, both websites had similar formats on their ‘About Us’ page, and neither listed any contact detail. Nio Thinker calls itself “your go-to destination for insightful, progressive news and analysis that challenges the status quo”, while Savannah Time says it is “a reflection of the values that make Savannah unique” and a place “where conservative values meet local insight.”
None of this surprises me. I fully expected threat actors from countries like Iran, Russia and China to try and mess with the US elections. The only thing that does surprise me that none of these warnings are new. But they seem to have gone unheeded. That’s a huge problem as it is pretty clear that the country isn’t prepared for something that they should have been prepared for.
August 12, 2024 at 9:21 am
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