WASHINGTON (AP) — The same Iranian hacking group that allegedly targeted both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns attempted to access the WhatsApp accounts of employees of the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Meta Platforms said Friday.
Meta said it discovered the hacking network, which posed as technical support staff from companies including AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, after people who received the suspicious WhatsApp messages reported them. Meta investigators linked the activity to the same network blamed for the hacking incident reported by the Trump campaign.
The FBI said this week that an Iranian hacking of the Trump campaign and an attempted break-in into the Biden-Harris campaign were part of a broader Iranian effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election.
In a statement on Friday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said the hackers attempted to attack the WhatsApp accounts of people in the Middle East, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as political and diplomatic officials – including unidentified officials from the Trump and Biden administrations. A “small group” of accounts have been blocked by Meta, the company said.
“We have not seen any evidence that the targeted WhatsApp accounts were compromised, but out of an abundance of caution, we are sharing our findings publicly and also sharing information with law enforcement and our industry colleagues,” Meta said in a statement.
In a report this month, Google’s threat intelligence division said the same Iranian group it linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard had been trying to infiltrate the personal email accounts of about a dozen people linked to Biden and Trump since May. That report complemented a separate study released by Microsoft a few days earlier that uncovered suspected Iranian cyberattacks on this year’s presidential election.
U.S. intelligence officials say Iran’s increasingly aggressive use of cyberattacks and disinformation has multiple motives: First, it wants to confuse and polarize voters to undermine faith in U.S. democracy; second, it wants to weaken support for Israel; and third, it wants to combat candidates it believes will increase tensions between Washington and Iran.
Iran has vowed revenge on Trump, whose administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
In July, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said the Iranian government had secretly supported American protests against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Iran-linked groups had posed as online activists, called for protests on campus and provided financial support to some protest groups, Haines said.
Messages left with Trump and Harris’ campaign teams were not immediately returned Friday.
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