Hackers and threat actors often get busy ahead of big political events across the world. Google has now confirmed that Iran-backed hacking group has been targeting accounts associated with the US presidential election. Google’s Threat Analysis Group posted a detailed blog on how hackers have been going after Israel as well. The hacker group goes by the name of APT 42.
“Associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), APT42 consistently targets high-profile users in Israel and the US, including current and former government officials, political campaigns, diplomats, individuals who work at think tanks, as well as NGOs and academic institutions that contribute to foreign policy conversations,” said Google in a blog post.
Google explained that APT42 uses a variety of different tactics as part of their email phishing campaigns — including hosting malware, phishing pages, and malicious redirects. “They generally try to abuse services like Google (i.e. Sites, Drive, Gmail, and others), Dropbox, OneDrive and others for these purposes,” said Google.
According to Google, there have been unsuccessful attempts from APT42 to compromise the personal accounts of individuals affiliated with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, including current and former government officials and individuals associated with the campaigns.
Google says that APT42 is a sophisticated, persistent threat actor and they show no signs of stopping their attempts to target users and deploy novel tactics. “This spring and summer, they have shown the ability to run numerous simultaneous phishing campaigns, particularly focused on Israel and the US,” said Google.
“We also informed campaign officials that Google was seeing heightened malicious activity originating from foreign state actors and underscored the importance of enhanced account security protections on personal email accounts,” the company noted in the blog post.
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