Google Warns of Persistent Iranian Cyber Threats to U.S. Campaigns

United States: Google has announced on this Wednesday that a hacking group which is seamlessly linked to Iran is still actively trying to break into the email accounts of officials and people of United States who directly somehow connected to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump.

 As reported by CNN, this is we can say a hacking operation, which began in May and June, targeted the personal email accounts of several individuals related to Biden and Trump, including current government officials.

Google researchers reported that even now, the hackers are making unsuccessful attempts to access these important email accounts.

Ongoing Iranian Intelligence Activity

The Google research also contributes to previous findings of a highly active Iranian intelligence gathering operation on the subject of the 2024 presidential election. As CNN and other outlets detailed this week, the suspected Iranian hackers targeted Stone’s personal email account – a longtime associate of the Trump campaign.

The Iranian hackers were also able to penetrate the personal Gmail account of ‘a high-profile political consultant’ Google revealed on Wednesday. The firm’s spokesman, however, did not respond to our question as to whether the political conssultant is Stone or another person. Google shared details regarding the hacking activity with the police in early July and is still doing so, it said.

Campaign Reactions and Other Threats

The process is still ongoing, let me remind you that the Harris campaign announced on Tuesday that it has indeed been the target of a ‘foreign actor influence operation,’ but stressed it had ‘no indication of any security breaches of our systems being a result of the mentioned efforts.’ Russia ‘still poses the biggest threat to the United States’ elections’, a US intelligence report revealed last month.

Russia’s choices for the presidential race have also remained the same as in 2020, said the US intelligence agencies, which found that Russia had tried to interfere in the election in favour of Trump and to tarnish Biden.

He is said to have tried to hack Trump’s campaign in June, which led to a flurry of activity inside the campaign, the FBI, and Microsoft, which had identified the intrusions, to limit the damage and to find out whether there was a larger Iranian threat. Microsoft published a report claiming that the IRGC-backed hacking operation aimed at an unidentified presidential campaign.