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Iranian state-backed actors have sought to access senior US political figures’ email accounts and launched “covert news sites” aimed at American readers as part of an increase in disinformation and cyber attacks ahead of the country’s elections, Microsoft has said.
A group run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in June sent a spear-phishing email, or personalised hacking attempt, to a “high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” from the compromised email account of a former senior adviser, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center said on Friday.
The same group tried unsuccessfully to log into the email account of a former presidential hopeful, the Seattle-based company said.
A different Iranian group was launching “covert news sites” targeting US voters on both ends of the political spectrum in the run-up to November’s presidential vote, said Microsoft.
One such website, called Nio Thinker, ran content that “insulted” former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, calling him an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA china shop”, the report said.
Such sites were using artificial intelligence to plagiarise content from US outlets in an effort to draw in traffic while hiding the original sources of the information, it found.
In 2018, during his previous term in office, Trump unilaterally abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord that Tehran had signed with world powers and imposed waves of sanctions on the Islamic republic, putting its economy under severe pressure.
Microsoft said it expected to see Iranian cyber attacks targeting political candidates, at the same time as malicious actors linked to the state sought to worsen existing divisions in the US, for example by exploiting racial tensions.
Such efforts, which could become more extreme and escalate into the incitement of violence against political figures, aimed to create chaos, undermine authorities and “sow doubt” about the integrity of the November election, the report said.
Iran’s mission to the UN said last month that Iran “has no intention or activities aimed at influencing the US elections”.
The Iranian mission told Reuters its cyber capabilities were “defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces” and it had no plans to launch cyber attacks. “The US presidential election is an internal matter in which Iran does not interfere,” the mission added in response to the Microsoft report.
Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center said that “foreign malign influence” related to the November election had “picked up pace over the last six months”, due initially to Russian efforts but more recently thanks to growing Iranian activity.
Experts are on high alert for disinformation and other digital interference ahead of November’s election, in which US vice-president Kamala Harris will compete against Trump.
Such efforts were thrust into the spotlight during and after the 2016 US presidential election, when Russian state-backed actors sought to interfere with the contest in which Trump won the White House.
Conspiracy theories have already mushroomed online ahead of this year’s vote, with experts alert to the potential for artificial intelligence to add to the volume of fake information designed to influence voters and stoke tensions.
Attempts by Iranian government-linked groups to influence US elections had been a “consistent feature” of at least the last three times the electorate went to the polls, Microsoft said.
However, activity had stepped up in recent weeks, with Iranian groups allegedly laying the “groundwork” for influence operations and taking steps to gather intelligence on political campaigns, the report said.
More broadly, Microsoft said it was tracking the use of AI in foreign powers’ influence operations. While malicious actors had experimented with the technology, many had “pivoted back” to simpler things including the mis-characterisation of content, it said.
Russian-backed groups, meanwhile, continued to push false information in the lead up to the election, including by promoting outlandish claims from “nonexistent whistleblowers”, disinformation and false conspiracy theories, the report said.
Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr
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