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Iranian hackers sent stolen information from Trump’s campaign team to people associated with Biden’s campaign
Massachusetts

Iranian hackers sent stolen information from Trump’s campaign team to people associated with Biden’s campaign



CNN

Iranian hackers stole unsolicited information from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the summer and sent it to people associated with Joe Biden’s campaign, federal officials said Wednesday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement that malicious Iranian cyber actors “sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign in late June and early July. The emails contained as text an excerpt of stolen, nonpublic material from former President Trump’s campaign.”

There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever responded, the statement said.

A spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said that “some individuals were specifically targeted for their private emails.”

“We have been working with appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,” said Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokeswoman for the Harris campaign.

“We are not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign; some individuals were targeted using their personal emails in what appeared to be a spam or phishing attempt. We strongly condemn any attempts by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections, including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity.”

A campaign official told CNN that “the material was not used.”

The Trump campaign said in a statement that Harris and Biden must “come clean about whether they used the hacked material,” claiming it was “further evidence that the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help the Democrats.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Uniondale, New York, on Wednesday.

CNN takes a look behind the scenes of Iran’s alleged hacking operation

During a rally in New York on Wednesday evening, Trump claimed, despite law enforcement’s statement, that Biden was involved in the hacking attack, but had no evidence to support this.

“Iran hacked into my campaign. I don’t know what the hell they found. I’d love to find out, it can’t have been too exciting, but they gave it to the Biden campaign. I can’t believe it – oh yes I can,” he said.

Hackers linked to the Iranian government have previously tried unsuccessfully to hack into the Biden-Harris campaign, according to U.S. authorities and private experts, but the activity revealed on Wednesday appears to be another attempt by Iran to disseminate information stolen from the Trump campaign.

According to US intelligence officials, Iran, along with Russia, is one of the most aggressive foreign powers trying to influence the 2024 US presidential election. And in doing so, Iran is using a hack-and-leak maneuver that Russia already used in the 2016 US election.

During the 2016 election, Trump asked Russia to “find” tens of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential candidate. According to reports from the U.S. Secret Service and the Justice Department, hackers from Russian military intelligence did indeed steal emails from Clinton’s campaign staff and the Democratic National Committee and sent them to WikiLeaks in an attempt to undermine Clinton’s candidacy.

CNN had previously reported that Iranian government-backed hackers stole internal Trump campaign documents this summer and leaked them to news organizations. Law enforcement officials’ statement on Wednesday said the hackers’ efforts to send information to U.S. media outlets were still ongoing.

The hacker attack was one of several attempts by the Iranian government to “sow discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process,” the statement said.

Politico reported that since July 22, the network has received emails containing internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official as well as a campaign research dossier on Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.

The New York Times and the Washington Post later reported that they had also been sent a similar cache, including a 271-page document on Vance dated February 23 marked “privileged and confidential,” which the newspapers said was based on publicly available information.

The Iranian hackers did indeed hack the email account of longtime Trump ally Roger Stone in June to attack campaign staff, CNN reported. US authorities believe the hackers are working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Investigators believe the suspected Iranian hackers gained access to Stone’s account and then used that email account to try to gain access to the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to gain access to the campaign’s networks.

The Iranian government has rejected US accusations that it is trying to interfere in the November elections.

“These allegations are devoid of any credibility and legitimacy, are fundamentally unfounded and completely inadmissible. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not participate in the United States’ internal unrest or electoral disputes,” Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said in a statement to CNN.

Meanwhile, according to US authorities, Russia has conducted covert influence operations of its own aimed at denigrating Harris’ campaign.

Russian intelligence agents have intensified their online attacks on Harris’ campaign team in recent weeks by producing and distributing videos propagating “absurd conspiracy theories” aimed at stoking racial and political divisions in the United States, Microsoft researchers said this week.

At a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday on foreign interference in the US elections, technology executives from Microsoft, Meta and Google praised their efforts to shut down fake accounts set up on their platforms by Russian, Iranian and Chinese intelligence services.

But several members of the committee feared that the tech platforms were not doing enough on the issue. The panel invited social media platform X to testify, but the company did not send a representative, according to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner.

A spokesperson for X told CNN in an email that the invited witness at the hearing was former head of global affairs Nick Pickles, who resigned on September 6.

U.S. technology companies have made “uneven” progress in curbing foreign disinformation on their platforms since the 2016 election, Warner said at the hearing.

“Too many companies have drastically scaled back their own efforts to prevent false information (from foreign sources),” said the Virginia Democrat.

Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers: “We know every day that there is a presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.”

“But this has also become a choice between Iran and Trump and between Russia and Harris,” he added.

This story has been updated with additional details.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Zachary Cohen and Artemis Moshtaghian contributed to this report.

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