Meta says Iranian-linked hackers posed as tech support on the WhatsApp messaging app to target people affiliated with the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, in the latest evidence of Iran’s attempts to influence the 2024 presidential election.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp said on Friday it has blocked a small cluster of WhatsApp accounts linked to a group of hackers affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The same group has also attempted email phishing attacks targeting people connected with Trump, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, Microsoft and Google have said in recent weeks.
Meta said it has not seen evidence the targeted WhatsApp accounts were successfully compromised, but said it has shared information with law enforcement and other tech companies.
On Monday, the U.S. government said Iran has been trying to hack both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns as part of efforts to shape the outcome of November’s vote.
“Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the federal cybersecurity agency CISA wrote in a joint statement. “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns.”
The Trump campaign has blamed the leak of internal documents to news outlets on Iran, which the FBI is investigating. The Harris campaign says it was warned by the FBI in July that it had been targeted by a foreign influence operation but is not aware of any security breaches.
Meta said the hackers on WhatsApp pretended to be technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Using an approach known as social engineering, they tried to trick targets into revealing sensitive information, such as account passwords. The company identified the campaign after some of the targets reported suspicious messages to WhatsApp.
The hackers also targeted “political and diplomatic officials, business and other public figures” in Israel, Palestine, Iran, the U.S., and the U.K., Meta said.
The group is well-known for using phishing and other attacks to compromise targets, including those perceived as Iran’s political enemies, dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists.
Copyright 2024 NPR
