The FBI said Monday afternoon that it is investigating efforts to hack both the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns.
The investigation includes attempted hacks targeting three Biden-Harris campaign staffers, as well as Roger Stone, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Washington Post first reported that attempted hacks of Biden-Harris staffers and Stone were part of the FBI investigation.
A Harris campaign official told NBC News that it did not appear to be a victim.
“Our campaign vigilantly monitors and protects against cyber threats, and we are not aware of any security breaches of our systems,” the official said.
It is not clear whether the targeting of the Biden staffers was successful, the source said. Stone told the Post he had been informed by authorities his email had been compromised.
Politico, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported over the weekend that they had received seemingly authentic files stolen from the Trump campaign. A Trump campaign spokesperson said Saturday that it had been hacked in June. NBC News has not received any of the purported files.
The FBI has not released any other information or characterized what hack, if any, happened. The Trump campaign has claimed that the files were part of an Iranian hacking operation that Microsoft announced Friday, citing the report as evidence. Microsoft has declined to comment, citing its policy of not sharing customer details without permission. The company does share such details if a customer formally asks it to do so, a spokesperson told NBC News.
The Trump campaign did not respond to an email asking it to clarify whether it had authorized Microsoft or any federal agency to speak publicly about the hack. Iran’s representative to the United Nations has denied that the country was behind the hack.
Cybersecurity and election security experts have consistently warned that foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections could include such “hack and leak” attacks, in which private systems are compromised to steal and later leak sensitive information. Hack-and-leak attacks have hit many elections around the world, most notably the U.S. election in 2016, when hackers working for Russian military intelligence stole emails and other files from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America organizations and methodically leaked them in the final months of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Security experts with the U.S. government and private organizations have warned that Russia, China and Iran appear to be making efforts to sway the 2024 U.S. election, with Iran seeking to undermine Trump, the Republican nominee.
The recent Microsoft report found that the hackers had broken into the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign and then used that account to send a phishing email to another high-ranking adviser on that campaign, and it said it recently alerted the campaign. Microsoft didn’t say whether the phishing email was successful or what campaign was targeted.
As of late Monday afternoon, little else was known about the purported hack, including the extent to which the Trump campaign was willing to work with the FBI.
Chris Krebs, chief intelligence and public policy officer at the cybersecurity company SentinelOne, said Trump and his aides may be reluctant to fully cooperate with federal investigators, given Trump’s “relationship with federal law enforcement.”
“There may not be a desire to collaborate all that much,” said Krebs, who was director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Trump administration and was fired by Trump after he declared the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
A decision not to cooperate fully with federal authorities could hamper and slow an investigation into the purported hack, Krebs said.
“That, unfortunately, can impede — from a national security perspective — our understanding of the event and what’s happening,” he said.
The claim from the Trump campaign adds to what had already been a deeply antagonistic relationship between Iran and the former president. While president, Trump authorized a 2020 drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, a key Iranian military leader. Last month, Biden administration officials said they had reason to believe Iran had planned to attempt to assassinate Trump. Iran’s representative to the U.N. also denied that allegation.
