The FBI confirmed that Iran was behind a cyberattack on an adviser to former President Donald Trump, part of a larger series of attacks on the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign as the Iranian government attempts to disrupt the upcoming U.S. election.

Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime adviser reported about a week ago that his email was hackedwhere attackers infiltrated his account and impersonated him to target Trump’s overall presidential campaign. In a joint statement, several federal intelligence agencies attributed these “recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign” to “increasingly aggressive Iranian activities during this election cycle.”

The intelligence community “is confident that the Iranians used social engineering and other efforts to gain access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties,” it said. the statement published Monday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “Such activities, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the U.S. election process.”

The confirmation of Iran’s involvement in attempts to disrupt the 2024 US presidential election is not surprising, as security researchers at Microsoft and Google had already discovered and reported it separately. On August 9, Microsoft revealed that the Iranian-backed Charming Kitten/APT42 group, which has ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had hacked email account of a former senior advisor to send malicious phishing emails to a high-ranking official in a presidential campaign, among other threatening activities by the group.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) followed up on that report last week, claiming that Charming Kitten was behind attempts to logging into personal email accounts of about a dozen people not only linked to Trump, but also to President Biden and Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The researchers did not name the officials targeted in the activity, but said they included current and former U.S. government officials, as well as individuals associated with the respective campaigns.

Further interference in elections by Iran likely

This year’s elections are seen by Iran as “particularly important in terms of the impact they could have on national security interests, increasing Tehran’s ability to influence the outcome.” That means that Iranian-backed threat groups like Charming Kitten and others will continue to try to disrupt the elections.

Russian-backed attacks on the 2016 presidential campaigns, which some believe contributed to Trump’s victory, are still fresh in the minds of federal officials, who want to prevent foreign entities from interfering in U.S. elections if they can help it. “Iran and Russia have used these tactics not only in the United States during this and previous federal election cycles, but also in other countries around the world,” officials said in their statement.

Security experts have been warning for some time that cybercriminals broadly oriented the 2024 US elections, using technologies such as artificial intelligenceamong other things, making it easier for them to do so. However, there is evidence to suggest that both campaigns better prepared in 2024 to defend themselves against such attacks than in previous elections.

Lest campaigners and other stakeholders in the election forget this, intelligence agencies reminded them in their statement that Iran’s “increasing intent to abuse our online platforms in support of its objectives” also means they must collectively “enhance the resilience of those platforms.”

Possible defense methods include using strong passwords and only using official email accounts for official business; regularly updating software; avoiding clicking on links or opening attachments in suspicious emails before verifying their authenticity with the sender; and using multi-factor authentication.