Google warns:

Iranian hackers have US election campaign teams in their sights

The Iranian hackers are said to have succeeded in accessing the Google Mail account of a high-ranking political advisor.(Bild: AFP/JOE RAEDLE)

A hacker group with close ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is said to have attempted to gain access to the email accounts of US Democratic and Republican candidate Donald Trump's campaign staff. This emerges from a report by the US company Google.

The hacker group, known as "APT42", is said to have accessed the personal emails of around a dozen high-ranking employees from the Democratic and Republican campaign camps in May and June. At the time, US President Joe Biden was still the likely Democratic presidential candidate, but after his withdrawal, Vice President Kamala Harris is now running against Trump.

APT42 succeeded in accessing the personal Gmail account of a high-ranking political advisor, the company announced in a report by the Threat Analysis Group. According to the information, the specialists investigate hacker attacks by state actors from abroad.

Israel also targeted
According to the report, around 60 percent of attempted attacks by APT42 in the past six months were aimed at targets in the USA and Israel. Since the beginning of May, there has been an increase in cyberattacks on users with connections to the Israeli military and defense sector as well as diplomats, academics and NGOs in Israel. Among other things, the hackers are said to have posed as employees of a well-known US think tank.

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat. This is how security authorities refer to groups controlled by authoritarian states that are tasked with systematically carrying out cyber attacks.

Since last weekend, there have been increasing indications that foreign actors are attempting to influence the US election campaign with hacker attacks. On Wednesday, Harris' election campaign team confirmed to dpa that it had been the target of a foreign cyber attack. The FBI had previously announced that it was investigating a possible hacker attack on the internal communications of Trump's election campaign team