Meta said on Friday that it had blocked a “small cluster” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacking group targeting officials related to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The company said in a Blog post that the fake WhatsApp accounts gave the impression to be from the Iranian threat actor often called APT42, which other technology firms similar to Google previously described as an “Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage actor.” The group has targeted various activists, non-governmental organizations, media outlets, and others.
Meta said the scheme was designed to “exploit political and diplomatic officials and other public figures, including some associated with the administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran and the United Kingdom.
With lower than 75 days to go before the November election, Meta is increasingly coming under public scrutiny for the best way it exploited and manipulated Facebook within the previous two presidential campaigns. The company said it had seen no evidence that WhatsApp users' accounts had been compromised and was sharing further information with “law enforcement and our industry colleagues.”
Meta explained that its security team was in a position to detect APT42's involvement after analyzing suspicious messages received by an unspecified variety of users from the fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.
“These accounts posed as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft,” Meta said within the blog post. “Some of the people targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tools.”
The Trump campaign announced earlier this month that a foreign actor had penetrated the network and illegally accessed internal communications. Microsoft said At the time, it was revealed that several Iranian hacker groups had been identified attempting to influence the US presidential election. It was also revealed that a bunch linked to APT42 “sent a spear phishing email to a senior presidential campaign official in June from the compromised email account of a former senior adviser.”
In 2019, Microsoft said Several hackers with ties to the Iranian government were identified, who were believed to have targeted an unspecified U.S. presidential campaign, other government officials, and the media.
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