The FBI said Monday afternoon that it was investigating what the Trump campaign said was a successful effort to hack into his campaign and steal private documents.
The FBI’s statement comes after Politico, washington post and new york times Reports emerged over the weekend that they had received seemingly authentic documents stolen from the Trump campaign. A spokesman for the Trump campaign said On Saturday, it was hacked in June. NBC News has not yet received any of the alleged documents.
The FBI has not released any additional information or described what, if any, hacking occurred. The Trump campaign claims the documents are part of an Iranian hacking operation launched by Microsoft declare Friday, citing the report as evidence. Microsoft declined to comment, saying its policy is not to share customer details without permission. A spokesperson told NBC News that Microsoft would indeed share these details if customers formally request it to do so.
The Trump campaign did not respond to an email seeking clarification on whether it had authorized Microsoft or any federal agency to speak publicly about the hack. Iran’s representative to the United Nations Denied The country is behind the hacking attacks.
Cybersecurity and election security experts have long warned that foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections could include such “hack and leak” attacks, in which private systems are compromised to steal and subsequently leak sensitive information. Hacking leak attacks have hit many elections around the world, most notably the 2016 US election, when Hackers working for Russian military intelligence Stealing emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America and methodically leaking them in the final months of Hillary’s campaign.
Security experts from the U.S. government and private organizations have Warning to Russia, China and Iran Iran appears to be working hard to influence the 2024 U.S. election. Iran is trying to weaken the influence of Republican candidate and former President Trump.
A recent Microsoft report found that hackers compromised the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign, then used the account to send phishing emails to another senior adviser to the campaign and, more recently, to the campaign An alarm was raised. Microsoft did not disclose whether the phishing emails were successful or what the targets of the campaign were.
As of late Monday afternoon, little was known about the alleged hack, including the extent to which the Trump campaign was willing to cooperate with the FBI.
Chris Krebs, chief intelligence and public policy officer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, said Trump and his aides may be unwilling to fully cooperate with federal investigators given the former president’s “relationships with federal law enforcement.”
“There may not be as much desire to cooperate,” said Krebs, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the Trump administration and declared the 2020 election the most secure in history Later fired by the former president.
Krebs said the decision not to fully cooperate with federal authorities could hinder and slow down the investigation into the alleged hack.
“Unfortunately, from a national security perspective, this may hamper our understanding of this incident and what’s going on,” he said.
The Trump campaign’s assertion intensifies an already deep hostility between Iran and the former president. During his term as president, Trump Authorizes drone strikes in 2020 Important Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani was killed. Last month, Biden administration officials said they had reason to believe Iran planned to assassinate Trump. Iran’s representative to the United Nations also denied the accusation.
Tehran has vowed to avenge the general’s death, and several former senior officials who worked in the Trump administration have government-funded security teams protecting them around the clock.
Former U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts say the best response to hacking and disinformation campaigns is transparency, providing accurate information quickly and exposing attempts to mislead the public.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called on federal authorities to immediately release any relevant information.
“The intelligence community should move quickly to declassify and disclose any appropriate information it has regarding the potential foreign nature of this interference,” Schiff said in a social media post. “Transparency remains our best defense against foreign influence operations.” Deterrence.
Schiff said U.S. intelligence agencies were too slow to respond to Russian election interference in 2016.
The hacking of Trump campaign documents echoes the 2016 Russian campaign against Hillary Clinton, but so far there appears to be significantly less sophistication in distributing the hacked documents.
The Russian operation involved an elaborate plan involving a fake hacktivist persona named Guccifer_2 after a hacker. real romanian hacker. The fake Guccifer had an active WordPress account and a Twitter account, which they used to share files.
Russia’s efforts also Provide documents to WikiLeakspublished them. It hosts Democratic Party documents separately on a website it created called DCLeaks, which has a corresponding Facebook page.
At least so far, there are no apparently similar hacks to Trump’s file distribution system. If the hackers were indeed working for Iran, it would appear to show a lack of foresight, said Simin Kargar, a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory who studies influence operations in the Middle East.
“They were a bit incompetent. If they really wanted to run a good hacking operation, they could have done better,” she said. “It’s very much in line with the style of Iranian actors.”
