Iranian Hackers Targeted Trump's Re-election Campaign
Source: NYT
By Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger
Oct. 4, 2019
Updated 5:03 p.m. ET
SAN FRANCISCO — Iranian hackers targeted President Trump’s re-election campaign, two people with knowledge of the attacks said on Friday, in a sign of how cyberattacks could become a fixture of the 2020 presidential election.
News that Mr. Trump’s campaign was an Iranian target came just hours after Microsoft said in a report that hackers, with apparent backing from Iran’s government, had made more than 2,700 attempts to identify the email accounts of current and former United States government officials, journalists covering political campaigns and accounts associated with a presidential campaign.
The two people, who were not allowed to publicly discuss the investigation into the hacks, said it was not clear what information was taken in the attack on the Trump campaign. While Microsoft did not name Iran’s targets in its report, it found evidence that hackers successfully infiltrated email inboxes in at least four cases.
Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement that “we have no indication that any of our campaign infrastructure was targeted.”
The Iranian attack is the latest indication that cyberattacks and disinformation are likely to play a major role in the 2020 presidential campaign, as they did four years ago.
But the incentives to influence the election are likely to be very different than they were in 2016 when Russian hackers infiltrated the computer networks of Democrats and Republicans, then selectively leaked and disseminated Democrats’ emails, including those of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, in an effort to harm Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/technology/iranian-campaign-hackers-microsoft.html
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