Presidential Campaigns Targeted by Suspected Chinese, Iranian Hackers
June 04 2020 - 02:53PM
Dow Jones News
By Robert McMillan
Campaign staffers working on the presidential campaigns of
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been targeted with online attacks
coming from Iran and China respectively, Google said Thursday.
These so-called phishing attacks are often an attempt to gain
access to online email accounts. They raise the specter of a repeat
of the 2016 campaign, during which Russian hackers stole
information from Democratic staffers and posted them online.
The attacks don't appear to have been successful, Google, a unit
of Alphabet Inc., said. The company has notified federal
authorities and the targeted users of the attacks, said Shane
Huntley, who runs Google's in-house counterespionage group, known
as the Threat Analysis Group.
The Biden campaign was targeted by a China-based group, known as
APT 31, Mr. Huntley said. This group has been linked by security
firms to the Chinese government. The Trump campaign was targeted by
an Iranian group called APT 35, he said. APT stands for advanced
persistent threat, a shorthand used by cybersecurity professionals
for sophisticated adversaries that are backed by nation-states.
These were "recent attempts and we saw a couple of targets on
each campaign," a Google spokeswoman said, while declining to
provide further details on the incidents.
Representatives of the Trump and Biden campaigns couldn't
immediately be reached for comment.
Microsoft Corp. in October said that at least one U.S.
presidential campaign has been targeted by cyberattacks linked to
the Iranian government. That attack targeted a staffer with the
Trump campaign, according to a source familiar with the matter.
(More to come)
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 04, 2020 14:38 ET (18:38 GMT)
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