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Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign revealed it was the target of a “foreign actor influence operation,” just days after Donald Trump’s campaign blamed Iran for an apparent hacking attempt following a wad of documents being leaked to reporters.
The vice-president’s team was notified of a purported breach by the FBI last month and continues to liaise with authorities, an anonymous campaign official revealed on Tuesday.
“We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts,” they told Reuters.
The FBI said it was investigating efforts to hack the then Biden-Harris campaign prior to the president’s abrupt departure from the Democratic ticket last month, according to The Washington Post.
The bureau declined to provide further information after a request by The Independent.
Spear-phishing emails were reportedly sent to three Biden-Harris aides in an attempt to gain access to wider email communication.
It comes after the FBI confirmed to The Independent that it launched an investigation when Trump’s campaign team claimed it had been hacked by a group believed to be connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On Friday, Microsoft announced it believed that the Iranian intelligence agency sent a phishing email to “a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”
That email belongs to one of Trump’s long-time allies and political strategists: Roger Stone.
The fervent Republican operative was convicted for lying to Congress in 2019 about efforts to dig up dirt about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign — before later being pardoned by then-president Trump.
His account was allegedly intended to be used as an intermediary to try to break into another account belonging to a senior campaign official.
Days later, there was an unsuccessful attempt to log into the account of a “former presidential candidate, as per Microsoft’s report.
“Mr Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” Stone’s attorney Grant Smith told The Independent.
Stone told The Post that he knows nothing more and “it’s all very strange.”
A day after Microsoft’s report was published, Trump said in a Truth Social statement that the tech giant alerted him that his campaign was “one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!”
The Independent cannot officially verify whether Iran were behind the alleged hacking of Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s campaign announced on Saturday that it was hacked after reporters at several outlets had received copies of what appeared to be an internal 271-page campaign vetting document for Trump’s running mate JD Vance.
It remains unclear whether the recent leak of Trump campaign documents to reporters had anything to do with the allegedly Iran-backed attempt to compromise his campaign through Stone’s email address.
A separate Iranian group was allegedly behind the breach of an account belonging to a “county-level government employee in a swing state,” according to Microsoft.
Microsoft also reported that another Iranian group was targeting American voters through propaganda-producing AI-generated websites designed to look like news outlets that plagiarized “at least some of their content” from US publications.
As far back as February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment report warned that Iran — alongside China and Russia — could possibly influence the election and sow dissent across the US.
In July, US intelligence officials warned that Iran — as it did in 2020 — would seek to “coerce political leaders, undermine political systems, and shape the political landscape in ways that favor its national security objectives.”
