Microsoft: Iran hacker is targeting the 2020 US presidential candidate

Recently, Microsoft revealed that they had evidence on hand that a group of hackers from Iran tried to access an e-mail account belonging to the 2020 presidential candidate. In a blog post announcing the discovery, Microsoft refused to disclose the name of the target presidential candidate, but confirmed that their account was not temporarily harmed by the threat organization called “Phosphorus.”

CNBC later reported that Trump suffered a cyberattack in the 2020 election. But Tim Murtaugh, the propaganda director of the Trump campaign, said, “We have no indication that any of our campaign infrastructure was targeted.”

The event is just one of a group of accounts that Iranian hackers are trying to invade within 30 days of August to September this year. Microsoft said its threat intelligence center observed that the organization had made more than “2,700 attempts to identify consumer email accounts belonging to specific Microsoft customers and then attack 241 of those accounts. The targeted accounts are associated with a U.S. presidential campaign, current and former U.S. government officials, journalists covering global politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised as a result of these attempts; these four accounts were not associated with the U.S. presidential campaign or current and former U.S. government officials.”

Microsoft said that Phosphorus tried to gain access to the link to the Microsoft e-mail account in order to crack it, and they also tried to steal the phone number associated with the user. The attack technique is not complicated and the goal is clear.