Researchers of Google TAG warned that APTs target campaign staff with phishing emails both for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
In recent phishing attacks, advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are targeted by Donald Trump and Joe Biden 's campaign personnel over the months of US presidential elections.
On Thursday, Shane Huntley and Google's Threat Analysis Group on Twitter said that they recently detected two distinct phishing campaigns. An APT Group linked to China was targeting the campaign staff of Biden, while an APT connected to Iran targeted Trump's campaign staff.
In a statement to Threatpost, a Google speaker confirmed that attackers aimed at personal emails from staff in both events and there was no evidence that the efforts were successful.
"We sent our standard government-supported warning to the targeted users and forwarded this data to federal police forces," said Threatpost spokesperson. "We encourage campaign staff to use their work and personal emails with additional protection."
Huntley said APT related to the Iranian campaign staff, APT 31, called Zirconium, had been targeted at Biden. This threat actor, according to reports, is linked with the Chinese government — however, its tactics and techniques are little known.
This trend is likely to continue as more and more communication takes place online.
Cybercriminals looking for this kind of information are the focus of election campaigns. Last year, an Iran-linked group of hackers targeted President Trump 's 2020 campaign to break into accounts. The activity was related to a Phosphorus group by researchers from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.
"Mobile phishing has been increasingly used by malicious players as an approach to stealing user credentials by getting users to enter these credentials into the fake cloud services portal used by political campaigns." "Mobile phishing attacks in the context of political campaigns have increased considerably."
