Roger Stone targeted in Trump hacking scheme as campaign blames Iran for document leak
Federal law enforcement agencies are investigating an apparent hacking incident involving Donald Trump’s campaign, which the former president is blaming on Iran, after a trove of documents were dumped to reporters over the weekend.
Hackers appear to have compromised an email account belonging to one of Trump’s long-time allies: Roger Stone.
The Republican operative’s email account was the victim of a phishing attempt, and his account was allegedly used to try to break into another that belonged to a senior campaign official.
Stone — who was convicted for lying to Congress in 2019 about efforts to dig up dirt about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign — was informed by the FBI as well as Microsoft that his email account was compromised by a “Foreign State Actor,” who sent messages containing a link that could give hackers access to that person’s computer.
But it remains unclear whether a recent leak of Trump campaign documents to reporters had anything to do with the allegedly Iran-backed attempt to compromise his campaign through Stone’s email account, and what, if anything, those apparent hacking attempts have yielded.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed to The Independent that the agency is investigating the matter but declined to provide any specific details about the investigation
“Mr. Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” Grant Smith, an attorney for the Republican operative, told The Independent. “Mr. Stone will have no further comment at this time.”
Last week, Microsoft reported that an Iranian group, believed to be connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent a phishing email in June to “a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor,” who is now believed to be Stone.
“The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link,” according to Microsoft’s report. “Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate. We’ve since notified those targeted.”
One day later, Trump claimed that Microsoft had told his campaign that “one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!”
He said that would-be hackers obtained only “publicly available information,” and appeared to blame President Joe Biden’s administration for the alleged attack.
“Iran and others will stop at nothing, because our government is Weak and Ineffective,” he wrote on Truth Social.
A separate Iranian group was allegedly behind the breach of an account belonging to a “county-level government employee in a swing state,” according to Microsoft.
“The compromise was part of a broader password spray operation and Microsoft Threat Intelligence did not observe the actor gain additional access beyond the single account, making it hard to discern the group’s ultimate objectives,” according to the report.
