U.S. intelligence agencies are said to be closely monitoring foreign governments’ and entities’ attempts to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
“We’re taking a very proactive approach,” an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told NBC News, noting that the concern is greater for interference from China and Iran than it is from Russia.
Well, perhaps their “proactive approach” isn’t quite enough.
The New York Times reports on the security breach. Here’s the start of the story:
For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.
On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.
By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.
The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.