State-backed hackers have targeted the election campaigns of US President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, Google said.
The company confirmed the findings after the director of its Threat Analysis Group, Shane Huntley, disclosed the attempts on Twitter.
Mr Huntley said a Chinese group known as Hurricane Panda targeted Trump campaign staff while an Iranian outfit known as Charming Kitten had attempted to breach accounts of Biden campaign workers.
Google said it saw no evidence that the phishing attempts were successful.
Such attempts typically involve forged emails with links designed to harvest passwords or infect devices with malware.
The effort targeted personal email accounts of staff in both campaigns, according to the company statement.
A Google spokesman added that “the timeline is recent and that a couple of people were targeted on both campaigns”.
He would not say how many.
Google said it sent targeted users “our standard government-backed attack warning” and referred the incidents to federal law enforcement.
Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, called the announcement “a major disclosure of potential cyber-enabled influence operations, just as we saw in 2016″.
His tweet referred to the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent online release of internal emails – some doctored – that US investigators determined sought to assist the Trump campaign.
READ MORE: George Floyd protests: More Republicans speak out against Trump
Neither the Biden nor the Trump campaign would say how many staff were targeted, when the attempts took place or whether the phishing was successful.
Both campaigns have been extremely reticent about discussing cyber security.
“The Trump campaign has been briefed that foreign actors unsuccessfully attempted to breach the technology of our staff,” the campaign said in a statement.
“We are vigilant about cyber security and do not discuss any of our precautions.”
The Biden campaign did not even confirm the attempt.
“We are aware of reports from Google that a foreign actor has made unsuccessful attempts to access the personal email accounts of campaign staff,” it said in a statement.
“We have known from the beginning of our campaign that we would be subject to such attacks and we are prepared for them.”
Hurricane Panda, also known by security researchers as Zirconium or APT31 – an abbreviation for “advanced persistent threat” – is known for focusing on intellectual property theft and other espionage.
Charming Kitten, also known as Newscaster and APT35, is reported to have targeted US and Middle Eastern government officials and businesses, also for information theft and spying.
In October, Microsoft said hackers linked to Iran’s government had targeted a US presidential campaign and the New York Times and Reuters identified the target as Mr Trump’s re-election campaign.
Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said at the time that there was “no indication that any of our campaign infrastructure was targeted”.
A former director of the National Security Agency, Keith Alexander, said he fully expects geopolitical rivals of the US to take advantage of the Covid-19 crisis and unrest in the country.
“This is an increased time I think for adversaries to hurt our country and I do think they will take that during elections,” he said.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here