A joint statement that the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released on Monday said hackers linked to the Iranian government were most likely responsible for the August cyberattack on former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the statement said.
It continued:
We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns. This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which [the U.S. intelligence community] attributes to Iran.
The three agencies added that they are “confident that the Iranians have, through social engineering and other efforts, sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties.”
The Trump campaign said “foreign sources hostile to the United States” hacked it on August 10. The hackers provided stolen internal documents to the political news website Politico, including research the campaign conducted on Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) before Trump chose him as his running mate.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the hackers sought to “sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” an analysis that the intelligence community statement supported on Monday.
Microsoft security researchers released a report in early August warning that hackers linked to the Iranian government were attacking U.S. officials during the presidential campaign. Google published a similar report on August 13, specifically naming a hacker group tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a major threat.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign said when the Google report was published that the FBI informed it of a threat from Iranian hackers in July. The Harris campaign said it was “not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts.”
The Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York dismissed the allegations in Monday’s intelligence community statement as “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing.”
“As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election,” the Iranian mission said.
“Should the U.S. government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence -if any- to which we will respond accordingly,” the Iranians added.
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