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    Chinese hackers collected audio from a Trump campaign adviser’s calls – report

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    Chinese state-affiliated hackers intercepted audio from the phone calls of US political figures, including an unnamed campaign adviser of Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported Sunday.Various media outlets reported on Friday that the Trump campaign was made aware last week that the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate JD Vance were among a number of people inside and outside of government whose phone numbers were targeted through the infiltration of Verizon phone systems.The FBI and the US cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency confirmed they were investigating unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by people associated with China, though they did not not name the Trump campaign in the statement.Reuters later reported that Chinese hackers also targeted phones used by people affiliated with the campaign of Kamala Harris.The Post now reports that the hackers were able to access audio from a phone call from a Trump campaign adviser, as well as unencrypted communications such as text messages of the individual.Trump’s campaign and the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Trump campaign was hacked earlier this year. The US justice department charged three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps with the hack, accusing them of trying to disrupt the 5 November election.Verizon said on Friday it was aware of a sophisticated attempt to target US telecoms and gather intelligence and is working with law enforcement.Congress is also investigating and earlier this month US lawmakers asked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to answer questions about reports Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers.The Chinese embassy in Washington DC said last week it was unaware of the specific situation but said China opposes and combats cyberattacks and cyber thefts in all forms. More

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      Chinese believed to have targeted Trump’s and Vance’s phones in US telecommunications breach

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      Chinese government-linked hackers are believed to have targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as part of a larger breach of US telecommunications networks, according to a New York Times report.The Trump campaign was informed this week that the phone numbers of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominee were among those targeted during a breach of the Verizon network, the paper said, citing sources.Investigators are working to determine what data, if any, was accessed by the “sophisticated” hack, the sources said. Other current and former government officials were also targeted, according to the report.The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed an investigation was under way into the “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China”. It did not name the Trump campaign in the statement.“After the FBI identified specific malicious activity targeting the sector, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) immediately notified affected companies, rendered technical assistance, and rapidly shared information to assist other potential victims,” the agency said.The Trump campaign did not directly address whether the phones used by Trump and Vance had been targeted.In a statement, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, criticized the White House and Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and sought to blame them for allowing a foreign adversary to target the campaign, the Times reported.A Wall Street Journal report last month said a cyber-attack linked to the Chinese government had infiltrated multiple US telecommunications firms and may have gained access to systems used by the federal government in court-approved wiretapping efforts.The hackers accessed at least three telecommunication companies – AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies – in what may have been an attempt to find sensitive information related to national security, according to the report.The Trump campaign earlier this year revealed it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US justice department unsealed criminal charges in September against three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps suspected of hacking the Trump campaign.Justice department officials said hackers were trying to undermine Trump’s campaign and intended to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of the 5 November election.With the election under two weeks away, Trump and Kamala Harris are locked in a tight race. In both national head-to-head polls and surveys in the crucial swing states where the election will be decided, the pair seem almost deadlocked. More

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      The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn’t say | Moira Donegan

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      The public got a peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign last week, when the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein did what major news outlets refused to: he published the opposition research dossier on JD Vance’s electoral vulnerabilities that was written by the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the VP announcement.The dossier, which was obtained in a hack thought to have been perpetrated by Iranian state interests, would have been compiled by Donald Trump’s camp as part of a routine vetting process as the Republican campaign surveilled possible VP picks and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. It is thorough: at 271 pages, it contains a robust and factual accounting of the vice-presidential candidate’s public statements and associations going back years. As such, it offers a unique perspective into how the Trump campaign views the race – and how they understand the controversial man who is now in their No 2 spot.But the document, a litany of everything the Trump camp thinks is wrong with Vance, is maybe most revealing for what it omits: there is almost nothing about his comments on women, and nothing at all about his extensive, repeated and impassioned hatred for childless women, including the “cat ladies” comment that has been Vance’s stickiest scandal and perhaps his greatest contribution to the campaign thus far. The comments that provoked the ire of thousands of women – including no less influential a figure than Taylor Swift – and turned the race partly into a referendum on the purpose and value of women’s lives were nowhere to be found in the document.Instead, the dossier was largely focused on comments by Vance that make him vulnerable with an audience of one: that is, his past negative statements about Trump.The mainstream news organizations that declined to publish this hacked document justified this decision by saying that much of the information was not newsworthy. If this is their standard, it seems to be a new one: in 2016, when Russian-backed hackers obtained emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, one of the disclosures included risotto cooking tips from campaign chair John Podesta. (He says that adding the liquid slowly helps the rice become creamier, in case you’re interested.) But the Vance dossier is newsworthy, though not because of what it reveals about Vance. What the document says about Vance himself is largely a matter of public record. What is newsworthy, instead, is what the document exposes about the Trump campaign’s priorities.The dossier concerns many worries that Vance is not conservative enough. It also seems preoccupied with how the Ohio senator has wounded Trump’s ego. The absence of Vance’s extreme gender views from the document suggests that the Trump campaign did not understand his comments on women to even be controversial: they don’t seem to have thought that it would come up.Maybe the Trump campaign is staffed with people, including the apparatchiks who do its vetting, who have so little exposure to feminism (or, perhaps, to women more broadly) that it simply did not occur to them that anyone would find Vance’s ravings about women offensive. Maybe the Trump camp made the calculation – one certainly not exclusive to the political right – that women’s investment in their own rights is partial and unserious, and that they would not be moved by gendered insults to their dignity in anything like meaningful numbers. Maybe they assumed that gender politics is now a man’s game, and that appeals to masculine woundedness and grievance now carry much more sway than appeals to women’s rights do. If this is what they think – that misogyny can be an asset for them but never a liability – it would certainly explain some of their actions.But the salience of the comments also signals something else that has changed this election: Trump no longer solely sets the terms of the conversation. Trump’s ability to command attention and to dictate the news cycle has noticeably waned this term – think, for instance, of how quickly and decisively each of his not one but two assassination attempts disappeared from the front pages, and how little an impact they seem to have ultimately had on his support. Trump has been unable to get a nickname to stick to Kamala; he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to generate vulgar distractions about her sexual history or the authenticity of her racial identity.So far, all he has managed to do is spread lurid and racist lies that have made life hell for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s vulgarity, his hysterics, his domineering indifference to the truth – all these used to fascinate voters, or at least the national media. But Trump has lost his juice.Which brings us to the other reason why the dossier may not have contained many of Vance’s most potent vulnerabilities: perhaps Trump’s staff overlooked them because they assumed that they would be able to generate the narrative on their own, assuming that it was they, and they alone, who would dictate what the media covered and what the public cared about. Those days are over. Just ask your local cat lady.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump campaign’s suspected Iranian hack may still be happening

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      A suspected Iranian hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has continued within the last 10 days and may still be happening, according to a journalist who received illegally obtained documents from the Republican nominee’s election effort.Judd Legum, the publisher of the progressive newsletter Popular Information, revealed that he was sent a letter that Trump’s lawyer had written to the New York Times on 15 September from a source called “Robert”, as well as dossiers on three potential running mates, including JD Vance, the current GOP vice-presidential nominee.The letter was verified to be authentic. “Robert” appeared to be the same source who had leaked other Trump materials to Politico, the New York Times and the Washington Post in August. The FBI has said it is investigating that leak as a suspected Iranian hack. The source known as “Robert” has been linked by a Microsoft threat analysis to a group within the theocratic regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which sent out phishing emails to presidential campaigns.US intelligence agencies revealed last week that Iranian hackers passed sensitive information stolen from Trump’s campaign to Joe Biden’s now-defunct presidential campaign in June and July. Legum’s disclosure suggests that the breach may have been more extensive than previously known and could still be under way despite the efforts of US security agencies.Legum said that he received a message from “Robert” on 18 September containing the cover page of a dossier on Vance. “Robert refused to identify himself,” Legum wrote, except to suggest it was the same “Robert” from the previous leaks.Legum – whose own communications were made public after the 2016 Russian hack of Hillary Clinton’s then campaign chair John Podesta – described then receiving a 271-page file on Vance, along with thick dossiers on Doug Burgum, the South Dakota governor, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, both of whom were considered by Trump as possible running mates. All documents were marked “Privileged & Confidential”.He said he was also sent a dozen emails purporting to be from senior Trump advisers Susie Wiles and Dan Scavino and pollster John McLaughlin, dated from October 2023 until last August.Legum said he also received a four-page letter sent by a Trump lawyer to three individuals at the New York Times just nine days ago, further evidence that the breach had not been plugged.“The letter has not been made public by either the Trump campaign or the paper,” Legum wrote.Legum then provided a copy of the letter to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor, who confirmed it as genuine after checking with a source at the New York Times who had already seen it. The letter complained about a Times article that questioned Trump’s validity as a successful businessman, Smith wrote in a separate piece.“The legitimacy of the letter proves that the person or people representing themselves as Robert has stolen electronic communications from people associated with the Trump campaign within the last 10 days,” Legum concluded.During a rally in New York last Wednesday, Trump referred to the disclosure of the breach from US intelligence agencies, saying: “Iran hacked into my campaign. I don’t know what the hell they found, I’d like to find out. Couldn’t have been too exciting.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe campaigns of Biden and Kamala Harris, as well as the media outlets that have received stolen Trump materials, have all declined to make them public – a stark contrast to the 2016 hack of Clinton, the results of which were published in multiple outlets, while Trump vocally encouraged Russia to continue hacking.Legum said he would stick to the current policy of non-publication.“It was tempting to use this opportunity to turn the tables on the Trump campaign and publish the stolen campaign materials provided to me by Robert,” he wrote. “But I believe that is the wrong approach.”A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said the hack showed that Iran is “terrified of the strength and resolve of Donald J Trump”.Suspected Iranian-backed plots to kill Trump – who has already survived two assassination attempts during the campaign – prompted the Secret Service in July to step up additional security at his rallies. The following month, a Pakistani national with suspected links to Iran was arrested on suspicion of plotting political assassinations on US soil, including against Trump. More

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      Google says Iranian group tried to hack Trump and Harris campaigns

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      Google said on Wednesday that an Iranian group linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris since May.The tech company’s threat intelligence arm said the group was still actively targeting people associated with Biden, Trump and Harris, who replaced the US president as the Democratic candidate last month when he dropped out. It said those targeted included current and former government officials, as well as presidential campaign affiliates.The new report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group affirms and expands on a Microsoft report released on Friday that revealed a suspected Iranian cyber intrusion in this year’s US presidential election. It sheds light on how foreign adversaries are ramping up their efforts to disrupt the election, which is less than three months away.Google’s report said its threat researchers detected and disrupted a “small but steady cadence” of the Iranian attackers using email credential phishing, a type of cyberattack in which the attacker poses as a trusted sender to try to get an email recipient to share their login details. John Hultquist, chief analyst for the company’s threat intelligence arm, said the company sends suspected targets of these attacks a Gmail popup that warns them that a government-backed attacker might be trying to steal their password.The report said Google observed the group gaining access to one high-profile political consultant’s personal Gmail account. Google reported the incident to the FBI in July. Microsoft’s Friday report shared similar information, noting that the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign had been compromised and weaponized to send a phishing email to a high-ranking campaign official.The group is familiar to Google’s threat intelligence arm and other researchers, and this is not the first time it has tried to interfere in US elections, Hultquist said. The report noted that the same Iranian group targeted both the Biden and Trump campaigns with phishing attacks during the 2020 cycle, as early as June of that year.The group also has been prolific in other cyber espionage activity, particularly in the Middle East, the report said. In recent months, as the Israel-Hamas war has aggravated tensions in the region, that activity has included email phishing campaigns targeted at Israeli diplomats, academics, non-governmental organizations and military affiliates.Trump’s campaign said on Saturday that it had been hacked and that sensitive internal documents had been stolen and distributed. It declared that Iranian actors were to blame.The same day, Politico revealed it had received leaked internal Trump campaign documents by email, though it was not clear whether the leaked documents were related to the suspected Iranian cyber activity. The Washington Post and the New York Times also received the documents.While the Trump campaign has not provided specific evidence linking Iran to the hack, both Trump and his longtime friend and former adviser Roger Stone have said they were contacted by Microsoft related to suspected cyber intrusions. Stone’s email was compromised by hackers targeting Trump’s campaign, a person familiar with the matter said.Google and Microsoft would not identify the people targeted in the Iranian intrusion attempts or confirm that Stone was among them. Google did confirm that the Iranian group in its report, which it calls APT42, was the same as the one in Microsoft’s research. Microsoft refers to the group as Mint Sandstorm.Harris’s campaign has declined to say whether it has identified any state-based intrusion attempts, but has said it vigilantly monitors cyber threats and is not aware of any security breaches of its systems.The FBI on Monday confirmed that it was investigating the intrusion into the Trump campaign. Two people familiar with the matter said the FBI was also investigating attempts to gain access to the Biden-Harris campaign.The reports of Iranian hacking come as US intelligence officials have warned of persistent and mounting efforts from both Russia and Iran to influence the US election through online activity. Beyond these hacking incidents, groups linked to the countries have used fake news websites and social media accounts to churn out content that appears intended to sway voters’ opinions.While neither Microsoft nor Google specified Iran’s intentions in the US presidential race, officials have previously hinted that Iran particularly opposes Trump. They have also expressed alarm about Tehran’s efforts to seek retaliation for a 2020 strike on an Iranian general that was ordered by Trump.Iran’s mission to the United Nations, when asked about the claim of the Trump campaign, denied being involved.“We do not accord any credence to such reports,” the mission told the Associated Press. “The Iranian government neither possesses nor harbors any intent or motive to interfere in the United States presidential election.”The mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Google’s report. More

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      FBI told Harris campaign it was target of ‘foreign actor influence operation’ – report

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said it was notified by the FBI last month that it was “targeted by a foreign actor influence operation”, a NBC News reporter said on Tuesday.“We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts,” the campaign said, according to the reporter.The FBI said on Monday that it was investigating after Harris’s Republican rival Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said it was hacked.More details soon … More

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      New York Times says it received hacked Trump campaign documents

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      The New York Times has confirmed it received the same or similar trove of Donald Trump presidential campaign documents as other media outlets did, after Microsoft confirmed that a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.For the third US election in a row, hacked campaign information by a foreign power is now likely to feature as potential disruption. The Trump campaign has said its email systems were breached by hackers working for Iran.Politico reported getting emails from someone who identified themselves only as “Robert” and sent internal campaign communications and a 271-page-long research dossier on Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, that was part of his vetting process. The news organisation said the Vance profile was “based on publicly available information”.On Monday, two Democratic lawmakers with experience on intelligence and security committees called for information about the latest breach to be released publicly.The California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell posted on social media that he was seeking a briefing on the breach, and that while he considered Trump “the most despicable person ever to seek office” – someone who had also called for hacking in the past – “that doesn’t mean America ever tolerates foreign interference.”Adam Schiff, the Democrat of California, urged Department of Homeland Security officials to declassify information on the foreign nature of the hack.Schiff said the US intelligence community “moved much too slow to properly identity the hacking and dumping scheme carried out by Russia” in 2016 and “should act quickly here”.He also said that in that year: “The Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, took advantage of it and then sought to deny it, much to the detriment of the country.”The Trump campaign’s announcement that its systems had been breached came after news organizations asked questions about Vance when he was a candidate for vice-president that appeared to come from internal vetting documents.The Washington Post said it had received a 271-page document marked “privileged & confidential” from an anonymous AOL customer known as Robert. Politico later said it had been receiving documents from someone who called themselves Robert since 22 July.Trump has said that only publicly available information was taken from its systems. “They were only able to get publicly available information but, nevertheless, they shouldn’t be doing anything of this nature,” he posted on Saturday evening. “Iran and others will stop at nothing.”A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said: “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.”While Microsoft has not confirmed that the Trump campaign was the target, it has said that an Iranian group run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards was behind a June attack on a presidential campaign.But the hack of the Trump campaign will serve as a warning that the last three months of the 2024 election could be as bumpy as the previous two elections. In 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign was hacked, allegedly by Russian agents, and hundreds of emails were published by WikiLeaks. Twelve Russian military intelligence officers were later indicted for their alleged roles in interfering in the US election.In 2020, the contents of a laptop later confirmed as belonging to Hunter Biden were released and became subject of a controversy, not only for its salacious leaked content but for a letter signed by former intelligence officials claiming that the leak had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.On Saturday, a spokesman for the national security council said Joe Biden’s administration “strongly condemns any foreign government or entity who attempts to interfere in our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”. The FBI has yet to comment. More

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      Philadelphia Inquirer severely disrupted by cyber-attack

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      The Philadelphia Inquirer is scrambling to restore its systems and resume normal operations after it became the latest major media organization to be targeted in a cyber-attack.With no regular Sunday newspaper and online stories also facing some delays, the cyber-attack has triggered the worst disruption to the Inquirer in decades.The attack aimed at Philadelphia’s paper of record has been reported to the FBI.Disruption to the Inquirer, the most read daily in Pennsylvania and the third-longest continuously serving newspaper in the US, comes as the city prepares for a mayoral primary election on Tuesday. The Inquirer’s offices are closed through at least Tuesday, and the company is looking for co-working space to serve as a makeshift newsroom for election night.It is unclear when normal editorial services will be restored.News organisations are increasingly being targeted by sophisticated cyber-attacks – as have government agencies, hospitals, universities and the business sector.In December, the Guardian was hit by a ransomware attack in which the personal data of staff in the UK and US was accessed. The print edition continued uninterrupted but the incident, which was probably triggered by a “phishing” attempt in which the victim is tricked – often through email – into downloading malware, forced the Guardian to close its offices for several months.The Los Angeles Times in 2018 was affected by a major ransomware attack in which a kind of malicious software that essentially paralyses a system – holding it to ransom – and demands payment to free the system.Few details about the attack on the Inquirer have been released to staff members or readers. It is unclear whether any personal data has been exposed, exactly which systems had been breached, or who was behind the attack and what motivations they had.In an email, the Inquirer’s publisher, Lisa Hughes. said “we are currently unable to provide an exact timeline” on when operations will be fully restored. “We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to fully restore systems and complete this investigation as soon as possible.”Monday’s newspapers were printed albeit without any classified ads.The incident is the greatest publication disruption to the state’s largest news organisation since a blizzard shut operations down for two days in January 1996, the company said. More

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      Sensitive personal data of US House and Senate members hacked, offered for sale

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      Sensitive personal data of US House and Senate members hacked, offered for saleBreach in the systems of DC Health Link, a health insurance company, led to 170,000 records being compromisedMembers of the House and Senate were informed Wednesday that hackers may have gained access to their sensitive personal data in a breach of a Washington, DC, health insurance marketplace. Employees of the lawmakers and their families were also affected.DC Health Link confirmed that data on an unspecified number of customers was affected and said it was notifying them and working with law enforcement. It said it was offering identity theft service to those affected and extending credit monitoring to all customers.Lawmaker who gave tours of Capitol will lead inquiry of January 6 panelRead moreThe FBI said it was aware of the incident and was assisting the investigation.A broker on an online crime forum claimed to have records on 170,000 DC Health Link customers and was offering them for sale for an unspecified amount. The broker claimed they were stolen Monday. The broker did not immediately respond to questions posed by the Associated Press on an encrypted chat site.It was not possible to confirm the number claimed. Sample stolen data was posted on the site for a dozen apparent customers. It included Social Security numbers, addresses, names of employers, phone numbers, emails and addresses. The AP reached one of the dozen by dialing a listed number.“Oh, my God,” the man said when informed the information was public. All 12 people listed work for the same company or are family members.In an email to all Senate email account holders, the sergeant at arms said it was informed that the stolen data included full names of the insured and family members but “no other personally identifiable information”,It recommended that anyone registered on the health insurance exchange freeze their credit to prevent identity theft.In an emailed statement, congressman Joe Morelle said House leadership was informed by Capitol police that DC Health Link “suffered an extraordinarily large data breach of enrollee information” that posed a “great risk” to members, employees and their family members. “At this time the cause, size and scope of the data breach impacting the DC Health Link still needs to be determined by the FBI,” Morelle said.The hack follows several recent breaches affecting US agencies. Hackers broke into a US marshals service computer system and activated ransomware on 17 February after stealing personally identifiable data about agency employees and targets of investigations.An FBI computer system was breached at the bureau’s New York field office, CNN reported in mid-February. Asked about that intrusion, the FBI issued a statement calling it “an isolated incident that has been contained”. It declined further comment, including when it occurred and whether ransomware was involved.There was no indication the Health Link breach was ransomware related.TopicsUS newsWashington DCCybercrimeHouse of RepresentativesUS SenateHackingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More