Weeks after giving an initial July briefing to reporters on foreign threats to the U.S. election, intelligence officials gave another briefing in which they backtracked on their original assessment.
Russia, which they had warned was the "preeminent threat" to the November vote, was no longer the top concern. Iran, which the officials had originally said was a lesser threat, aims to be more than just a chaos agent this election cycle.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the intel officials said Tehran's goal is to damage former President Donald Trump's candidacy, as it crudely tried to do in the 2020 election.
The Trump campaign said Saturday that it was hacked by "foreign sources hostile to the United States," and blamed the breach on Iran. Hoping to get the stolen internal Trump files published, an anonymous source that called itself "Robert" had shared the material with reporters at several different media outlets, according to the Journal.
The news came a day after Microsoft published threat assessment research detailing a number of efforts by Iran to target the 2024 election, including attempts, beginning in June, by a group linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to hack into an unidentified presidential campaign.
In a blog post, Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, said cyber groups connected to Iran had broadened the scope of their election interference efforts in recent weeks.
"First, they've laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters — especially in swing states," Watts wrote. "Second, they've launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future."
Adding to an election season rocked by the assassination attempt against Trump and President Joe Biden's decision to drop his reelection bid, the officials said Iran has demonstrated the most eagerness to disrupt the American election despite being embroiled in regional conflicts in the Middle East.
"The regime is already trying to assassinate Trump and former senior members of his administration, so I don't think anyone should be surprised it would hack the campaign to try to influence the election," Rich Goldberg, a former Trump National Security Council official, told the Journal.
Two administration officials said the White House first learned of the hack from Politico's Saturday report. National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said the "Biden-Harris administration strongly condemns any foreign government or entity who attempts to interfere in our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions."
According to Steven Adair, president of the cybersecurity firm Volexity, Iranian hackers have become highly skilled at cyberattacks known as spear-phishing campaigns.
"They're pretty sophisticated and they're very persistent," Adair told the Journal.
The hackers pretend to be someone, such as a professor or journalist, and strike up an email correspondence with the victim before sending a shared document that directs them to log into a phony phishing site that looks like a legitimate site like Microsoft or Google.
Because the victim has just emailed with someone for an extended period of time, their "guard is a little down," Adair said, adding that although Iranian hackers typically steal their victims' data, he has not seen them try to leak the information after obtaining it.
Nicole Wells ✉
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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