Meta takes down more accounts tied to Iranian hackers targeting the U.S. election

Meta says Iranian-linked hackers posed as tech support on the WhatsApp messaging app to target people affiliated with the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, in the latest evidence of Iran’s attempts to influence the 2024 presidential election.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp said on Friday it has blocked a small cluster of WhatsApp accounts linked to a group of hackers affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The same group has also attempted email phishing attacks targeting people connected with Trump, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, Microsoft and Google have said in recent weeks.

Meta said it has not seen evidence the targeted WhatsApp accounts were successfully compromised, but said it has shared information with law enforcement and other tech companies.

On Monday, the U.S. government said Iran has been trying to hack both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns as part of efforts to shape the outcome of November’s vote.

“Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the federal cybersecurity agency CISA wrote in a joint statement. “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns.”

The Trump campaign has blamed the leak of internal documents to news outlets on Iran, which the FBI is investigating. The Harris campaign says it was