Iranian hackers tried to send stolen Trump data to Biden campaign, FBI says – National
Iranian hackers seeking to impress President Joe Biden’s campaign with information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign sent unsolicited emails to people connected to the Democratic president in an attempt to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other government agencies said Wednesday.
There is no evidence that any recipients have responded, officials said, preventing hacked data from emerging in the final months of a closely contested election.
The hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people associated with Biden’s campaign before he resigned. The emails “contain an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public campaign materials of former President Trump as text in the emails,” according to a US government statement.
The announcement is the latest effort to publicize what officials say is Iran’s intense, ongoing work to interfere in the 2024 election, including a hacking and bribery campaign that the FBI and other government agencies linked last month to Tehran. The Department of Justice was preparing charges for those violations, the Associated Press reported.
The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have said that the Trump campaign and the attempt to undermine the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voter confidence in the election and to harm it. disagreement.
The Trump campaign disclosed on August 10 that it had been hacked and that Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets – Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post – have been leaked classified material from within the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to divulge details about their findings.
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Politico reported that it first received emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — forwarded what appears to be a research document the campaign apparently made to the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. The document is dated February 23, nearly five months before Trump chose Vance as his running mate.
In a statement, Morgan Finkelstein, spokesperson for the Kamala Harris campaign, said that the campaign has been cooperating with law enforcement since they discovered that people connected to the Biden team were among the recipients of the emails.
“We don’t know anything about being sent directly to the campaign; “a few people have their personal emails targeted in what appears to be spam or a phishing attempt,” Finkelstein said.
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