Meta said on Friday it had identified possible hacking attempts on the WhatsApp accounts of U.S. officials from the administrations of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, blaming the same Iranian hacker group revealed earlier this month to have compromised the Trump campaign.
In a blog post, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp described the attempt as a “small cluster of likely social engineering activity on WhatsApp” involving accounts posing as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Meta takes down more accounts tied to Iranian hackers targeting the U.S. election – The company says the hackers posed as tech support to target people affiliated with President Biden and Donald Trump, in the latest evidence of Iran’s attempts to influen… https://t.co/pN48MO4pjI
— Olav Mitchell Underdal (@omunderdal) August 23, 2024
It blocked the accounts after users reported the activity as suspicious and had not seen any evidence suggesting the targeted WhatsApp accounts had been compromised, it said.
Meta attributed the activity to APT42, a hacking group widely believed to be associated with an intelligence division inside Iran’s military that is known for placing surveillance
software on the mobile phones of its victims.
The software enables the team to record calls, steal text messages and silently turn on
cameras and microphones, according to researchers who follow the group.
It linked the group’s activity to efforts to breach U.S. presidential campaigns reported by Microsoft and Google earlier this month, ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
The company’s blog post did not name the individuals targeted, saying only that the hackers “appeared to have focused on political and diplomatic officials, business and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.”
Those figures were based in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Iran, the United States and the United Kingdom, it added.
(REUTERS)
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
