US digital giant Meta said on Friday it had blocked a number of WhatsApp accounts it believed were linked to an Iranian hacking group and which it believed had targeted political leaders close to US President Joe Biden or his predecessor Donald Trump.
According to Meta, these numbers were used to address people in several countries besides the United States, notably in “Israel, Palestine, Iran, and the United Kingdom.”
“Their efforts appeared to focus on political or diplomatic officials as well as public figures, some of whom were associated with the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump,” the group said in a statement.
The investigation conducted would have made it possible to trace the APT42 group, “an Iranian cyber threat known for its campaigns that use simple phishing techniques to steal people’s access”.
In a previous investigation, Meta had already linked the group to attempts on human rights defenders in Iran and Israel, politicians in the US and researchers and journalists specializing in Iran all over the world.
Among the techniques used, the hackers pretended to be the technical support of the access provider AOL, Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft.
Meta specifies that it was alerted by reports sent by some of the people who were targeted, and also believed that none of the intrusion attempts bore fruit.
This is not the first time Iran has been accused of trying to hack political leaders during the election campaign and as the Nov. 5 presidential election approaches.
OpenAI warned on August 16 that ChatGPT had been used to produce content, particularly related to the election, by an Iranian group, identified as Storm-20235, which was attempting to carry out an influence operation, specifying that the content had reached a limited audience.
OpenAI made the connection between this operation and the one revealed on August 9 by Microsoft, also of Iranian origin, which combined the creation of fake information websites, cyber attacks and hacking, as well as fake accounts on social networks, which would sometimes be attempts to to intimidate or incite violence against political figures.
Donald Trump’s campaign team, for its part, claimed on August 10 to have suffered a hack, blaming “foreign sources” and pointing to the Middle Eastern country.
The specialized media Politico had previously said that it had received emails with information about the Republican candidate’s campaign from a source who had refused to identify himself, with the US authorities confirming that the source was indeed linked to Iran.
els/pno