Saturday, October 5, 2019

Iranians targeting US 2020 election

And why wouldn't they?  It worked beautifully for the Russians, and Mitch McConnell blocks Democrats' attempts to tighten election security. We're wide open.
A hacking group that appears to be linked to the Iranian government targeted a United States 2020 presidential campaign, Microsoft Corp said on Friday.

Microsoft saw "significant" activity by the group that also targeted current and former US government officials, journalists covering global politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran, the company said in a blog post.

In a 30-day period between August and September, the group, called "Phosphorous" by the company, made more than 2,700 attempts to identify consumer email accounts belonging to specific customers and then attacked 241 of those accounts.

[...]

Microsoft said Phosphorous used information gathered from researching their targets or other means to game password reset or account recovery features and attempt to take over some targeted accounts.

The attacks disclosed by the company on Friday were not technically sophisticated, the blog said. Hackers tried to use a significant amount of personal information to attack targets, it said.

  alJazeera
They'll get better.
"This effort suggests Phosphorous is highly motivated and willing to invest significant time and resources engaging in research and other means of information gathering," the software company said in a blog post.

Microsoft declined to identify the campaign targeted, citing privacy concerns.

[...]

The company said those accounts that were comprised were not related to US campaigns or officials.

Microsoft has been tracking Phosphorus since 2013 and said in March that it had received a court order to take control of 99 websites the group used to execute attacks.

Phosphorus is also known as APT 35, Charming Kitten, and Ajax Security Team, according to Microsoft.

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