Each day brings new details about Iranian-backed efforts to interfere in the American presidential election. Washington Times reporter Ryan Lovelace has been all over this story for weeks and is tracking fresh information from Google, which says it stopped Iran-sponsored efforts to hack into the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.
TAG, a Google unit focused on combating government-backed hackers, said it detected and disrupted a “small but steady cadence” of “phishing” attempts from the Iranian APT42 hacking group to gain access to the email accounts of senior campaign officials on both sides.
The latest developments come less than a week after the Trump campaign said Iranian hackers were behind the theft of internal documents. They also come on the heels of revelations from a top cyber intelligence firm that Iran is behind a coordinated effort to spread conspiracy theories about the July assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. Microsoft has offered its own recent warnings about Iranian election-meddling efforts.
Key lawmakers on Capitol Hill say the situation has become urgent, and they want both political parties to work together to counter adversaries’ attempts to influence U.S. elections.
“Protecting the integrity of our elections from foreign meddling requires constant attention. This includes bolstering campaign cybersecurity, heightened vigilance from media outlets on the potential of spreading hacked or manipulated content from foreign intelligence services, and a commitment by both political parties to call out foreign election influence efforts,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat, and Florida Vice Chairman Sen. Marco Rubio, the panel’s ranking Republican, said in a joint statement late Wednesday.