Iran launches disinformation campaign ahead of US election

Iran is striking left and right in an attempt to interfere with the US presidential election in November with slick-looking websites, hackers and phishing attacks.

The objective of the sophisticated campaign, US intelligence and cyber threat experts say, is to fuel distrust in the US democratic system and to exploit and increase social divisions.

As the Nov. 5 election approaches, Iranian hackers have been accused of targeting the email accounts of both Republican candidate former President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

US analysts and researchers say both political campaigns have been targeted by phishing attacks carried out by a group with suspected links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the armed forces.

And experts say an Iranian network called “Storm-2035” operates several fake news sites on the web and social media that use AI-generated content to stir up conservative and liberal dissent.

“Iran’s primary goal in this space is to sow discord and chaos and undermine the integrity of the United States’ electoral system,” said Simin Kargar, a non-resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) in Washington.

“If they can pull this off, even on a very small scale, it would be a testament to Iran’s long-standing rhetoric that democracy is a ‘flawed Western concept’ and even the US, which has often accused Iran of fraudulent elections, is susceptible to election-related controversies,” she added in written comments.

At least four”Secret news sites run by Iran masquerading as news outlets” operated by Storm-2035 were identified by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) as “actively engaging US voter groups on opposite ends of the political spectrum with polarizing messages about issues such as US presidential candidates, LGBTQ rights. , and the Israel-Hamas conflict”.

The Gaza War is a popular choice of divisive content used by Even Politics, featured here, and other Iranian-operated sites that sow electoral discord.

In an August 9 report, MTAC identified three of the sites by name – Even Politics (evenpolitics.com), Nio Thinker (niothinker.com) and Savannah Time (savannahtime.com).

With Trump and Harris in a tight race 11 weeks before the vote, Even Politics publishes content focused on the ongoing war in Gaza, alleged threats to democracy and the influence of religious groups. Much of the content on the site appeared to be directed against Trump.

The Nio Thinker, which emerged shortly after the Gaza war began in October, has since shifted its focus from that conflict to the US election. His content targets a “liberal audience” with “sarcastic, long-winded articles bashing Trump,” according to MTAC, including one calling him an “opioid-filled elephant in the China MAGA store.”

Hot Button Topics

The site also tracks Harris’ alleged unwavering support for Israel, vice-presidential nominees for both parties, and stokes the flames on hot-button topics like corporate influence and immigration.

An article presented as an op-ed features “Why Harris’ Stance on Palestine Cost Her”. A story titled “JD Vance And The Rise Of The Sperm Cups” poked fun at Trump’s running mate for his stance on “family values,” which he described as a “round trip to the 1950s.” And another written from the “perspective of an FBI agent” claimed that Harris’ colleague Tim Walz has a “‘longstanding connection’ to China and its government.”

The third site, Savannah Time, presents itself as originating from the city of Savannah in the key state of Georgia. That site, according to Darren Linvill, co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center, the Media Forensics Hub, is clearly meant to appeal to the right, with stories insulting Harris and her supporters.

Harris’s economic policies are often in the crosshairs of the city of Savannah, with one article describing them as “fiscally reckless economy that would make even a drunken sailor blush.” Another accuses it of “a dangerous flirtation with communist-style price controls.”

Most of the articles published by the three sites are written by “staff”, and artificial intelligence research company Open AI said in a report on August 16 that Storm-2035 relied heavily on ChatGPT to generate its content .

Experts suggest that in many ways Iran’s approach to influencing the US electoral system mirrors that of Russia, which used troll farms to flood social media with disinformation and divisive content during the 2016 presidential election, favoring it Trump against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“What we’ve seen from these websites suggests some sort of Russian-style (campaign) where they’ve created websites that target both left-wing and right-wing communities,” Linvill said.

“(They want to) use those websites to target these communities to spread misinformation and probably make our politics more extreme than it would have been otherwise and facilitate the process of fighting between us,” he added.

“Remarkably well done”

Linvill also said that Iranian sites outperform their Russian counterparts in some ways and have improved over the years.

“They are really remarkably well made. They’re clearly using AI in really interesting ways to create their content, but they’re really well put together,” Linvill said.

Iranian efforts to influence the US election process have been noted as far back as 2018, when they were inauthentic. characters were used to impersonate candidates for the US House of Representatives and pose for journalists, according to cyber threat intelligence specialists Mandiant.

Analysts suggest the campaign grew in scale after the assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in a US airstrike in Iraq in January 2020 under then-President Trump.

Two Iranian citizens, for example, have been charged by the United States for their involvement in a cyber campaign to influence American voters in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden.

Mandiant noted that Iranian actors sent threatening emails to voters in the United States during the 2020 campaign. Mandiant and other cyber experts also said Iran used media sites such as Even Politics to try to influence midterm elections in 2022.

In addition to using media platforms, US intelligence agencies and cyber threat experts say Iran is currently using hacking and phishing attacks in an attempt to disrupt the November presidential vote.

The Trump campaign on Aug. 10 blamed the Iranian government for hacking some of its internal communications, prompting a federal investigation.

A joint assessment by three US intelligence agencies released on August 19 confirmed “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle,” including “recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign.”

This came after the US director of national intelligence suggested in July that Tehran’s efforts to influence the election were “probably due to Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive it would increase tensions with the United States.”

Given Soleimeni’s assassination, the unilateral US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the worsening of relations under the Trump administration, many experts suggest that Tehran would not favor another Trump presidency. The Trump campaign, following the attacks it attributed to Iran, suggested it was due to past hostilities with Tehran.

“Hyper-polarized Climate”

DFRLab’s Kargar said in written comments that he had not “seen sufficient evidence of favoring one candidate over another.” But Kargar said that “given Trump’s first-term policies toward Iran, it would only make sense that Iran would want to avoid a second Trump term at all costs.”

But Harris’ campaign was also targeted. The joint US intelligence report this month also said it was confident that “the Iranians have sought, through social engineering and other efforts, access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties.”

And a Google Threat Analysis Group on August 14 said this APT42 used phishing campaigns in an attempt to compromise “the personal (email) accounts of individuals associated with President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former President Trump, including current and former government officials and individuals associated with the campaigns.”

Tehran is targeting both the Republican and Democratic camps because “Iran is looking for ways to sow discord and create zones between different voter communities in a hyper-polarized climate,” Kargar said.

Russia, Kargar added, did the same in 2016.

The bigger question is whether Iran’s campaign had any impact on an election that is already divisive in its own right.

Little is known about the hacking attacks confirmed by U.S. intelligence, although Trump wrote on social media that the hackers “were only able to obtain publicly available information,” and the U.S. press has not published documents that Trump’s campaign allegedly had were sent anonymously.

As for the bogus websites operated by Iran’s Storm-2035 campaign, Linvill said “no one is talking about them.”

“It seems likely that these were set up for a future purpose to aid a future narrative laundering campaign that has not yet been undertaken,” Linvill said.

Such campaigns usually have a very specific goal in mind or a specific story the actor wants to spread, Livill said, but “we just can’t say what that might be.”

Linvill said he expects that to be clarified as the election approaches.

Via RFE/RL

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