Hackers hit Joe Biden, Donald Trump

Campaign staffers working on the campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been targeted online by Iran and China.

Google says state-based hackers have targeted the campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Picture: AP

Campaign staffers working on the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been targeted with online attacks from Iran and China ­respectively.

Google said on Friday that the staffers were targeted with phishing attacks. They raise the spectre of a repeat of the 2016 campaign, during which Russian hackers stole information from Democrat staffers.

While neither China nor Iran are thought to have previously engaged in the kind of hacking and public dumping of emails that disrupted Hillary Clinton’s campaign four years ago, cybersecurity experts believe that Russia’s success in 2016 may spur copycat activity.

The fact that the attacks targeted campaign staff should put campaigns on alert for a possible attempt to hack and dump information, said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It should be a major red flag.”

The attacks don’t appear to have been successful, Google said. The company has notified US authorities and the targeted users of the attacks.

The Biden campaign was targeted by a China-based group known as APT 31, said Shane Huntley, who runs Google’s in-house counter-espionage group, known as the Threat Analysis Group. This group has been linked by security companies to the Chinese government. The Trump campaign was targeted by an Iranian group called APT 35, he said.

APT stands for advanced persistent threat, a shorthand used by cybersecurity professionals for sophisticated adversaries that are backed by nation states.

These were “recent attempts and we saw a couple of targets on each campaign”, a Google spokeswoman said while declining to provide further details on the incidents.

The phishing attempts were recent and targeted a “couple” of personal email accounts belonging to staffers with each campaign, she said.

“We have known from the beginning of our campaign that we would be subject to such attacks and we are prepared for them,” a Biden campaign spokesman said. The Trump campaign has been briefed on the attempt.

The Wall Street Journal