Harris campaign targeted by 'foreign actor influence operation' days after Trump's Iran hack claim

WASHINGTON, DC: Kamala Harris’ campaign revealed that it was the target of a "foreign actor influence operation" days after Donald Trump’s campaign blamed Iran for hacking and leaking a document with JD Vance's information.  

The Middle Eastern nation has long been called a "chaos agent" when it comes to cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, according to the Independent.

Kamala Harris' campaign was notified of a purported breach by the FBI

An anonymous campaign official revealed on Tuesday, August 13, that Kamala Harris' team was notified of a purported breach by the FBI in July and continues to liaise with authorities.

They informed Reuters, "We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts."

The FBI mentioned they were investigating efforts to hack the then-Biden-Harris campaign before the president’s abrupt departure from the Democratic ticket in July, as per the Washington Post.

Notably, spear-phishing emails were delivered to three Biden-Harris aides to gain access to wider email communication.

The FBI launched an investigation when Trump’s campaign declared on Saturday that it was hacked by a group believed to be connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after reporters at different media outlets received copies of an internal 271-page dossier on Vance. 

Microsoft reported that it believed the Iranian intelligence agency sent a phishing email to "a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor."

Elon Musk claims his interview with Donald Trump was hit by DDoS attack

Elon Musk claimed that his X Spaces interview with Donald Trump on Tuesday was the target of a "massive DDOS attack." 

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a form of cyberattack where an attacker tries to make a computer or network resource unavailable by blocking it with a flood of traffic from multiple sources.

DDoS attacks can be launched in many ways such as traffic flood, application attack, and amplification attack, which means using any third-party services to increase the traffic and overwhelm the target.

In his post, Musk wrote, "There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later." 

The interview was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to technical difficulties. 

In another post, the Tesla CEO claimed the social media platform had "tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today."