Metadata said Friday that it had blocked a “small group” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacker group that was targeting officials linked to President Donald Trump. Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The company said in a blog post that the fake WhatsApp accounts appear to originate from an Iranian threat actor known as APT42, which other tech companies like Google before described is “an Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage actor.” The group has targeted activists, NGOs, media outlets and many others.
Meta said the scheme aimed to exploit “political and diplomatic officials, as well as other public figures, including some associated with the Biden and former Trump administrations.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran, and the United Kingdom.
With less than 75 days until the November election, Meta is drawing increasing public attention due to the ways Facebook was exploited and manipulated during the previous two presidential campaigns. The company said it has not seen any evidence that any WhatsApp user accounts were compromised and that it is sharing more information with “law enforcement and our industry peers.”
Meta said its security team was able to detect APT42’s involvement after analyzing suspicious messages that an unspecified number of users reported receiving from fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.
“These accounts posed as tech support for AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft,” Meta said in a blog post. “Some of the people targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tools.”
Trump campaign speak earlier this month that a foreign actor had breached its network and illegally obtained internal communications. Microsoft also speak At the time, the agency identified several Iranian hacker groups attempting to influence the US presidential election, and a group affiliated with APT42 “sent a spear-phishing email in June to a senior presidential campaign official from the compromised email account of a former senior adviser.”
In 2019, Microsoft speak has identified several hackers linked to the Iranian government who are believed to have targeted an unidentified U.S. presidential campaign along with other government officials and media.
