Microsoft: Iran seeks to interfere in US elections
In a new cyber intelligence report, Microsoft has warned that hackers and fake news sites believed to be linked to Iran may be plotting something in the US.
According to RT, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) released a nine-page report on August 9, claiming to have discovered traces of influence campaigns targeting Americans, mainly related to Iran but also China and Russia.
“Iranian actors have recently laid the groundwork for influence campaigns targeting the American public and may seek to influence the 2024 US presidential election,” MTAC said.
A network believed to be Iranian, called Storm-2035, is said to operate four fake news websites, each targeting a different group of American voters. One of these websites, Savannah Time, focuses on Republican politics and covers LGBT and transgender issues.
Another site, Nio Thinker, targets Democrats and posts “satire, wordy” articles attacking Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
MTAC points to the third site in the group as EvenPolitics, while the fourth site has not yet been identified. The company claims the sites used an AI-powered service to plagiarize “at least some of their content from US publications.”
In addition to fake news sites, MTAC claims to have identified two Iranian hacker groups linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). One group, called Mint Sandstorm, attempted to hack a presidential campaign in June by sending “a sophisticated spear-phishing email to a senior presidential campaign official from the compromised email account of a former senior adviser.”
MTAC said Mint Sandstorm “also attempted, unsuccessfully, to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate” around June 13. While the group is often involved in espionage, MTAC said these actions “suggest” that their targeting may be related to the election.
Another group “with assessed ties” to the IRGC, known as Peach Sandstorm or APT-33, successfully hacked into the account of a county government “in a critical state” where “a race-related controversy made national news this year.”
According to RT, the US government and major tech companies have claimed since 2016 that Russia and other foreign governments have carried out cyberattacks and “influence campaigns” with the goal of undermining US elections. The only exception was the 2020 vote, which both government agencies and private companies claimed was “the most secure in American history.”
