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Microsoft cybersecurity researchers published a report on Friday that said hackers tied to the Iranian government are attacking U.S. officials during the American presidential campaign.
“Iran’s operations have been notable and distinguishable from Russian campaigns for appearing later in the election season and employing cyberattacks more geared toward election conduct than swaying voters,” the report observed. It was not clear what Iran’s hackers hoped to accomplish with this setup, since actual news sites in the United States tend to be rather polarized these days. The examples of Iranian propaganda included in the Microsoft report did not look all that much different from the fare on mainstream-media websites. Presumably Iran thought it could use its phony sites to sow even more discord, but that would be a tall order in 2024.
Iran is reportedly mixing some brute-force cyberattacks with its influence operations. In one notable instance, a hacking group linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent a “spear-phishing email” to a “high-ranking official of a presidential campaign.” This lower-level breach was part of what MTAC described as a “password spray operation,” essentially a brute-force tactic in which hackers blast away at a range of accounts with commonly used low-security passwords, and sometimes passwords they obtain from other systems through data theft, until they get lucky and penetrate someone’s account by guessing correctly.
It was difficult for Microsoft to determine the objective of the hackers, although the IRGC-linked group involved – code-named APT-33 or “Peach Sandstorm” – has a history of “strategic intelligence collection” targeting the “satellite, defense, and pharmaceutical sectors,” as well as U.S. government organizations in “swing states.”
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