CNN
—
Google said Wednesday that a suspected Iranian hacking operation targeting U.S. presidential campaigns is still ongoing and more extensive than previously known. The hackers continued to target the email accounts of current U.S. officials and people associated with Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
In May and June, a hacking group with ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard targeted the personal email accounts of about a dozen people associated with Biden and Trump, including current administration officials, Google researchers said in a blog post. And even today, Google is recording unsuccessful attempts by Iranian hackers to log into the accounts of people associated with Biden, Harris, Trump and both presidential campaigns.
The Google research adds to existing evidence of Iran’s aggressive efforts to gather intelligence on the 2024 presidential campaign. CNN and other media reported this week that suspected Iranian hackers broke into the personal email account of longtime Republican activist Roger Stone in an attempt to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
The Iranian hackers managed to break into the personal Gmail account of a “high-profile political adviser,” Google said on Wednesday. A company spokesman declined to comment when asked whether this political adviser was Stone or someone else. Google passed on information about the hacker activities to law enforcement authorities in early July and is continuing to cooperate, the company said.
The Harris campaign confirmed on Tuesday that it had been the target of a “foreign influence operation,” but said the campaign had “no knowledge of any breaches of our systems as a result of these efforts.”
U.S. intelligence and national security officials are bracing for foreign attempts to influence or monitor the 2024 election. The alleged Iranian hacking campaign is one of the first major warning shots.
“With less than 100 days until the election, it is clear that our foreign adversaries have a strong interest in disrupting our democratic process,” Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the leading Democrats and Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Russia “remains the biggest threat to the U.S. election,” said a U.S. intelligence assessment released last month. Russia’s preferences for the presidential election have not changed since 2020, when Moscow conducted a series of influence operations to support Trump and denigrate Biden, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The alleged Iranian hacking of the Trump campaign in June sparked an uproar within the campaign. The FBI and Microsoft, which discovered the intrusions, attempted to contain the incident and determine whether there was a broader cyber threat from Iran. Microsoft released a report saying the IRGC-backed group’s hacking activity was directed against an unnamed presidential campaign.
In addition to the hacking, internal Trump campaign documents were leaked to some media outlets via a pseudonymous email account, which Politico first reported on Saturday. It is not yet clear whether the hacking and the leak are related.
The Trump campaign blames Iran for the leaked documents, but the US government has not yet made a formal decision on who is responsible for the hacking attack or the leak and whether there is a connection between the two incidents.
The Iranian government has denied the allegations. “The Iranian government has neither the intention nor the motive to interfere in the US presidential election,” said a spokesman for Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations.
The sinister tracking of political campaigns is bringing back memories among lawmakers and U.S. officials of 2016, when U.S. intelligence agencies said Russian spies stole documents from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign and released them in an attempt to damage Clinton’s campaign.
Google told both campaigns that it was “observing increased malicious activity from foreign state actors” and stressed to the campaigns “the importance of enhanced account security measures for personal email accounts.”
The Russian intelligence services’ use of bots, trolls and hackers in the 2016 US election was a new strategy for foreign agents to influence American voters. Since then, the field of foreign meddlers has become increasingly crowded.
Some U.S. officials were surprised by Iran’s aggressive crackdown on U.S. voters in the 2020 election. According to the Justice Department, Iranian activists posed as far-right Proud Boys to intimidate voters and created a website that threatened election officials.
“Iran has the ability and the intent” to influence the U.S. election with influence operations, said William Evanina, former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the U.S. counterintelligence agency. And Tehran is willing to take risks that other governments might not, he said.
“I think they will definitely be aggressive in the next 90 days,” Evanina said, referring to the short time until Election Day.
This story has been updated with additional details.
