Google’s threat team confirms Iran targeting Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns

Google’s Threat Analysis Group confirmed Wednesday that they observed a threat actor backed by the Iranian government targeting Google accounts associated with US presidential campaigns, in addition to stepped-up attacks on Israeli targets.

APT42, associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, “consistently targets high-profile users in Israel and the US,” the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) writes. The Iranian group uses hosted malware, phishing pages, malicious redirects, and other tactics to gain access to Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and other cloud-based accounts. Google’s TAG writes that it reset accounts, sent warnings to users, and blacklisted domains associated with APT42’s phishing attempts.

Among APT42’s tools were Google Sites pages that appeared to be a petition from legitimate Jewish activists, calling on Israel to mediate its ongoing conflict with Hamas. The page was fashioned from image files, not HTML, and an ngrok redirect sent users to phishing pages when they moved to sign the petition.

In the US, Google’s TAG notes that, as with the 2020 elections, APT42 is actively targeting the personal emails of “roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and former President Trump.” TAG confirms that APT42 “successfully gained access to the personal Gmail account of a high-profile political consultant,” which may be longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, as reported by The Guardian, CNN, and The Washington Post, among others. Microsoft separately noted last week that a “former senior advisor” to the Trump campaign had his Microsoft account compromised, which Stone also confirmed.

“Today, TAG continues to observe unsuccessful attempts from APT42 to compromise the personal accounts of individuals affiliated with President Biden, Vice President Harris and former President Trump, including current and former government officials and individuals associated with the campaigns,” Google’s TAG writes.