Washington: Microsoft researchers said on Friday that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a "high ranking official" on the US presidential campaign in June, weeks after breaching the account of a county-level US official.
The breaches were part of Iranian groups' increasing attempts to influence the US presidential election in November, the researchers said in a report that did not provide any further detail on the "official" in question.
The report follows recent statements by senior US Intelligence officials that they'd seen Iran ramp up use of clandestine social media accounts with the aim to use them to try to sow political discord in the United States.
Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York told Reuters in a statement that its cyber capabilities were "defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces" and that it had no plans to launch cyber attacks. "The U.S. presidential election is an internal matter in which Iran does not interfere," the mission added in response to the allegations in the Microsoft report.
"A group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” and “another group with assessed links to the IRGC compromised a user account with minimal access permissions at a county-level government,” the report said.
It said the activity appeared part of a broader push by Iranian groups to gain intelligence on US political campaigns and target US swing states. It said the county employee's account was breached in May as part of a wider "password spray operation" - one where hackers use common or leaked passwords en masse on many accounts until they can break into one.