On Friday, Microsoft published a report claiming that a hacking group led by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had managed to access the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a senior official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.
On Saturday night, former President Donald Trump declared that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian government. Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He blamed it all on what he called, with characteristic selective capitalization, a “weak and ineffective” Biden administration.
The facts were more murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to accomplish.
The Trump campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents actually arose from Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from within the campaign.
The New York Times received what appears to be a similar, if not identical, set of data from an anonymous whistleblower who claims to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.
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According to researchers, there is no doubt that the Iranians want to see Trump defeated. As president, he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposed economic sanctions on Iran, and then in January 2020 ordered the assassination in Iraq of Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, a clandestine wing of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for operations abroad. Trump often presents his actions against Iran as a test of his strength, despite the fact that his exit from the Iran deal gave Tehran an opportunity to rebuild a nuclear program that had been hampered by the 2015 deal.
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