Saturday, October 24, 2020

'Dumb mistake' exposed Iranian hand behind fake Proud Boys U.S. election emails - sources

https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-dumb-mistake-exposed-iranian-201352811.html


Christopher Bing and Jack Stubbs
,Reuters•October 22, 2020


Government analysts and private sector investigators were able to rapidly attribute to Iranian hackers a wave of thousands of threatening emails aimed at U.S. voters because of mistakes made in a video attached to some of the messages, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Those failures provided a rare opportunity for the U.S. government to identify and publicly announce blame for a malicious cyber operation in a matter of days, something that usually requires months of technical analysis and supporting intelligence.

"Either they made a dumb mistake or wanted to get caught," said a senior U.S. government official, who asked not to be identified. "We are not concerned about this activity being some kind of false flag due to other supporting evidence. This was Iran."

Attribution to Iranian hackers does not necessarily mean a group is working at the behest of the government there. Iranian officials denied the U.S. allegations.

"These accusations are nothing more than another scenario to undermine voter confidence in the security of the U.S. election, and are absurd," said Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York.



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