FBI: Iranian Cyber Attacks Against U.S. Target Public Officials

(New York, N.Y.) –  Prior to the U.S. presidential inauguration last month, the FBI warned of an Iranian “Enemies of the People” online campaign to intimidate U.S. officials and spread disinformation with the intent to "create fear, divisions, and mistrust in the United States and undermine public confidence in the U.S. electoral process.” Officials identified, for example, an active Telegram channel that has shared personal and identifying information of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

The campaign is not the first time the Islamic Republic has sought to use its cyber capabilities offensively. In December 2020, the FBI found that a website associated with “Enemies of the People” exploited claims of voter fraud in the U.S. to incite “lethal violence” against the FBI director, a former U.S. cybersecurity official, and state election officials who were involved in refuting the claims.

Prior to the election, Reuters reported that there is evidence Iran had tried to hack into voter roll data in certain states, and the U.S. intelligence community warned Iran aims to “undermine U.S. democratic institutions.” Iran has also targeted American officials and U.S. military personnel by taking control of their Google accounts, attempted to hack email accounts of U.S. presidential campaigns and the World Health Organization, and tried to disrupt the public conversation on Twitter during the first U.S. presidential debate.

These incidents demonstrate the growing investment Tehran is making in its cyber operations, which United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)’s resource, The Iranian Cyber Threat, explores and analyzes. UANI has warned that as Iran’s capabilities have expanded, the regime’s malign activities in the offensive cyber realm have increased. Iran has kept up a steady drumbeat of lower-level attacks against the U.S., its allies, and regime opponents at home and abroad, some successful and others thwarted. The most common publicly-known attacks include simple website defacements, online disinformation campaigns to push pro-Iranian regime and anti-U.S. narratives, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and theft of personally identifiable information and intellectual property. At times, Iran has pushed the envelope launching attacks using destructive wiper malware, crippling entire computer networks.

To read UANI’s resource, The Iranian Cyber Threat, please click here.