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The revelation through Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe marked the first known effort of a foreign opponent in this election cycle to achieve an express electorate in order to undermine democratic trust. The announcement came two weeks before the November 3 election.
At an convened press conference, Ratcliffe said Iran and Russia had “obtained” voter registration data. He warned that voter data, some of which can be obtained publicly and others can be purchased, can be used through foreign actors in an attempt to “sow confusion, sow chaos, and undermine their confidence in American democracy. “
Ratcliffe accused Iran of being aware of sending “forged emails intended to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and harm President Trump,” he said.
The emails were allegedly from Proud Boys, a far-right organization that supports Trump, but were instead designed through execution at the request of the Iranian government, according to a U. S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the case. The operation appears to be exploiting a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.
The messages said the organization “owned all its information” and asked the electorate to replace its party record and vote for Trump.
“You’ll vote for Trump on Election Day or we’ll chase you,” warns the emails tuesday night that would have reached the electorate in up to four states, three of which will be held hostage in the upcoming presidential election.
Analysts said targeting the Democratic electorate would possibly have been an effort across Iran to initiate court cases opposed to a far-right Trump-related organization. “If it has become transparent that the threats came here from the crusade of Trump or his allies, he would gently misrepresent the president himself,” said Ariane Tabatabai, middle East member of the Alliance to Secure Democracy.
John Scott-Railton, principal investigator at citizen lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, warned that guessing can take time.
“Achieving one’s goal is as complicated as the context of people’s minds, and no one has the simple component with that,” he said.
The emails, which were first leaked Tuesday through local police and election officials in Florida and Alaska, triggered an investigation that was temporarily extended to federal authorities, according to US officials.
Ratcliffe showed that Iran also distributed a video “which implies that Americans can vote fraudulently, even from abroad. “The video, which was reviewed through The Washington Post, shows Trump making derogatory comments about the vote by mail, followed by a logo with the call from Then, documenting what has been done to make it look like a piracy of voting knowledge to produce a fraudulent ballot. The video was also posted to a Twitter account that has since been suspended.
“This video, and all the allegations about such allegedly fraudulent ballots, are true,” Ratcliffe said at a news convention on Wednesday. “These moves are desperate attempts through desperate adversaries. “
Relations between Tehran and Washington were much tougher under the Trump administration, which withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. The United States has put increasing pressure on Iran through sanctions and other actions, adding targeted killing in Iraq in January of Iran’s top army commander, Qassem Soleimani.
In August, the most sensible counterintelligence official in the US intelligence community was the most sensible counterintelligence officer in the US intelligence community. William Evanina published an assessment that “Iran seeks to undermine U. S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and divide the country before the 2020 election. “His efforts, he wrote, “will likely influence online influence, such as the dissemination of incorrect information on social media and the recirculation of anti-American content. “
By suggesting that the organization had access to privileged knowledge and eventually penetrated electronic systems to discover how other people voted, the emails and video content attributed to Iran were designed to create the appearance of an electoral violation. Such an initiative can serve to undermine confidence in the integrity of democratic procedure without poseing a genuine threat to elections, cybersecurity and incorrect information experts said.
“In recent years, Iranian data operations have continued to overcome the barriers of ambitious and cutting-edge approaches. However, this incident marks a basic change in our understanding of Iran’s willingness to interfere in the democratic process,” said John Hultquist, senior director of inquiry. for Mandiant Threat Intelligence. ” While many of its operations have focused on selling propaganda in Iran’s interests, this incident obviously aims to undermine voter confidence. “
Department of Homeland Security officials warned state and local election directors wednesday that a foreign government is guilty of online bombing, according to U. S. officials and national and local officials who participated in the call, all of whom spoke under anonymity because of the sensitivity of a DHS official also said the government had detected holes in state and local election websites and asked participants who chose their online services correctly.
According to many analysts, the metadata of dozens of emails has reported the use of servers in Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
“Obviously, it’s fixed and highly planned,” said Rita Katz, CEO of SITE Intelligence Group.
The domain enlisted for the deceptive operation, officialproudboys. com, was recently abandoned by a hosting company using Google Cloud services, according to Google Cloud spokesman Ted Ladd. Without a secure host, the domain was vulnerable to exploitation, cybersecurity experts said. Use of Comcast, Yahoo, and Gmail accounts was affected.
In addition to reports from Florida and Alaska, a Pennsylvania voter told The Washington Post that she had won one of the emails, although she suspected it might be similar to her previous record in Alaska. The Pennsylvania attorney general had not won any reports. about the messages, a spokesman, Mark Shade, said Wednesday.
Clarke said his organization, after launching an appeal on social media, had won 104 court cases of emails with the same pattern. One group, Proofpoint, said their studies showed that one batch contained more than 1,500 emails.
Enrique Tarrio, the proud Boys president and Trump’s Latino director in the state of Florida, denied any involvement, saying the organization operated two sites and strayed further from the box used in the email campaign.
“Two weeks ago, I think, Google Cloud took us off its platform, so we introduced a URL transfer, which is still in progress,” he said in an interview. “We never use it. “
Democrats in Alachua County, north-central Florida, began receiving threatening messages Tuesday morning, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Art Forgey, said. Alaska’s electorate has also done so, said Casey Steinau, president of the Alaska Democratic Party.
Even when the president casts doubts about mail voting, federal law enforcement officials and election directors have emphasized the security of the process, which has been a regime in some states for years, and warned of imaginable mis information designed to create the appearance of fraud or to stoke fears of voter intimidation , which in itself threatens to keep the electorate away from the ballot box.
Tarrio, determined to reject the Proud Boys’ belief of involvement, said he had spoken to an FBI agent about the episode, but Amanda Videll, a spokesperson for the Jacksonville, Florida office, declined to comment.
Bennett Ragan, cross-manager of a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in Gainesville, Florida, said he won two of the threatening messages in his Gmail account and was aware of at least 10 other similar emails that had reached friends or associates. He said the house deal cited in the emails he won may be just from a 2018 Florida voters list, as he has moved several times in recent years.
Ragan said he believed the purpose of intimidating the Democratic electorate in a wobbly state with much-contested careers on November 3.
“When there are other people who have an electoral list and then send emails, they make a sensation. They’ll scare other people. That’s the intention,” he said.
The accommodation service that in the past ran the Proud Boys domain canceled registration after Google Cloud informed the visitor that a nonprofit had raised considerations about the debatable organization, said Ladd, a spokesperson for Google Cloud.
Following the hosting service’s action, the domain appears to have gone unsa protected, allowing anyone on the Internet to take it and use it to send threatening messages, said Trevor Davis, ceo of CounterAction, a Washington-based virtual enterprise. .
The seizure, which began on October 8, “probably made them vulnerable to this kind of embezzlement,” Davis said. “Bad actors are looking for opportunities on the Internet. Given the proud boys’ public profile and the likelihood that whoever sends those emails will have access to an election file, this turns out to be opportunism. “
A metadata-related IP (Internet Protocol) had already been reported in at least one email, indicating its most likely use in scam or phishing operations, said Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst and vice president of analysis at Alethea Group, an organization. combat online threats and misinformation.
The Proud Boys gained national notoriety last month in the first presidential debate between Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, when the president sent an invitation from Fox News moderator Chris Wallace to denounce white supremacists. When Biden advised Trump to denounce the Proud Boys, he said they deserve to “step back and be prepared,” a comment that was widely celebrated on social media through the organization as a call to action.
Memes circulated in line with words embedded in the Proud Boys logo. A manipulated symbol showed Trump dressed in one of Proud Boys’ iconic polo shirts. Another online poster took the opportunity to promote it T-shirts and hoodies with the band logo and the words “FIER THE STANDING BY GARON”.
The organization’s leaders say they don’t help white supremacy, but they had a contingent at the prominent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The Proud Boys have also participated in protests against coronavirus shutdowns and, more recently, protests in Portland. Oregon. Facebook has banned the organization as a hate organization, and the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies it as a hate organization and says its leaders “regularly spread white nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists. “
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