A hacker group close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is said to have attempted to gain access to email accounts of campaign staff of the US Democrats and the Republican candidate Donald Trump to obtain.
This is according to a report by the US company Google. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is the elite military force of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The hacker group, which operates under the name “APT42” is known to have accessed the personal emails of about a dozen high-ranking employees from the Democratic and Republican campaign camps in May and June. At that time, US President Joe Biden still the likely presidential candidate of the Democrats, after his withdrawal Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump.
APT42 managed to access the personal Google Mail account of a high-ranking political advisor, the company said in a report by the Threat Analysis Group (TAG). According to the information, the specialists are investigating hacker attacks by state actors from abroad.
In the past six months, around 60 percent of APT42’s attempted attacks were aimed at targets in the US and Israel, the report states. Since the beginning of May, there have been increasing numbers of cyberattacks on users with ties to the Israeli military and defense sector, as well as to diplomats, academics and NGOs in Israel. Among other things, the hackers are said to have posed as employees of a well-known US think tank.
APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat. This is the term used by security authorities to describe groups controlled by authoritarian states that are tasked with systematically carrying out cyber attacks.
Since the weekend, there have been increasing indications that foreign actors are attempting to influence the US election campaign with hacker attacks. On Wednesday, Harris’ campaign team confirmed to the dpa that they had been the target of a foreign cyber attack. The FBI had previously announced that it was investigating possible hacker access to internal communications from Trump’s campaign team.