Google says Iranian efforts to hack US presidential campaigns are ongoing, wide-ranging

(CNN) — Google said Wednesday that an alleged Iranian hacking operation aimed at US presidential campaigns is ongoing and more wide-ranging than previously known as the hackers continue to target the email accounts of current US officials and people associated with Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

In May and June, a hacking group linked with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted the personal email accounts of about a dozen people associated with Biden and Trump, including current government officials, Google researchers said in a blog post. And even today, Google is seeing unsuccessful attempts by the Iranian hackers to log into the accounts of people associated with Biden, Harris, Trump and both presidential campaigns.

The Google research adds to existing evidence of an aggressive effort by Iran to collect intelligence related to the 2024 presidential campaign. CNN and other outlets reported this week that the suspected Iranian hackers had breached the personal email account of longtime Republican operative Roger Stone in an effort to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

The Iranian hackers successfully broke into the personal Gmail account of “a high-profile political consultant,” Google said on Wednesday. A company spokesperson declined to comment when asked if this political consultant was Stone or someone else. Google passed on information about the hacking activity to law enforcement in early July and is continuing to cooperate, the company said.

The Harris campaign confirmed on Tuesday that it had been targeted by a “foreign actor influence operation,” but said the campaign was not “aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts.”

US intelligence and national security officials have been preparing for foreign efforts to influence or monitor the 2024 election, and the alleged Iranian hacking campaign is one of the first big shots across the bow.

“With less than 100 days to go before the election, it is clear that our foreign adversaries are intently interested in disrupting our democratic process,” Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the top Democrat and Republican, respectively, on the intelligence committee, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Russia “remains the predominant threat to U.S. elections,” said a US intelligence assessment released last month. Russia’s preferences for the presidential race also haven’t shifted since 2020, according to US intelligence officials, when Moscow conducted a range of influence operations in support of Trump and aimed at denigrating Biden.

The alleged Iranian hacking aimed at the Trump campaign, which occurred in June, set off a scramble within the campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, which spotted the intrusion attempts, to contain the incident and to determine if there was a broader cyber threat from Iran. Microsoft released a report saying the hacking activity from the IRGC-backed group targeted an unnamed presidential campaign.

In addition to the hacking effort, a pseudonymous email account has leaked internal Trump campaign documents to some media outlets, which Politico first reported on Saturday. It’s not yet clear if the hack and the leak are connected.

The Trump campaign has blamed Iran for the leaked documents, but the US government has yet to make a formal determination of who is responsible for the hack or the leak, and if the two incidents are connected.

The Iranian government has denied the allegations. “The Iranian government neither possesses nor harbors any intent or motive to interfere in the United States presidential election,” said a spokesperson for Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.

The shadowy targeting of political campaigns has evoked memories in lawmakers and US officials of 2016, when, according to US intelligence, Russian spies stole documents from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and leaked them in an effort to undermine the Clinton campaign.

Google has told both campaigns that it is “seeing heightened malicious activity originating from foreign state actors” and has stressed to the campaigns “the importance of enhanced account security protections on personal email accounts.”

The Russian intelligence services’ use of bots, trolls and hacking in the 2016 US election represented a new playbook for foreign operatives to try to influence American voters. Since then, the field of foreign meddlers has grown more crowded.

Iran caught some US officials off-guard in how aggressive it was in targeting US voters in the 2020 election. Iranian operatives impersonated the far-right Proud Boys group in an effort to intimidate voters and created a website that threatened election officials, according to the Justice Department.

“Iran has the capability and the intent” to target the US election with influence operations, said William Evanina, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the US counterintelligence agency. And Tehran is willing to take risks that other governments may not be, he said.

“I believe they will be aggressive for the next 90 days for sure,” Evanina said, referring to the rough amount of time left before Election Day.