Washington — Federal investigators are looking into whether Iranian hackers targeted individuals associated with the Trump and Biden-Harris campaigns, three people familiar with the investigation confirmed to CBS News.
The FBI launched the probe in early summer, after both presidential campaigns experienced phishing attempts targeting people on the campaign trail, the sources said. Iran-backed cybercriminals are the potential suspects. Washington Post first reported the details of the FBI’s investigation into the campaigns.
The news comes after the FBI confirmed in a brief statement on Monday that it was investigating allegations the Trump campaign had been targeted by Iranian hackers. The agency declined to comment further.
Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said in a statement Saturday that it had been hacked and suggested Iranian actors were involved in stealing and distributing sensitive internal documents.
While there are no details linking the alleged hack to Iran, the claim followed the publication of a new report from Microsoft that cited a case in June in which an Iranian military intelligence unit sent “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official at a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior adviser.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung blamed the hack on “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” according to a statement released Saturday.
CBS News reached out to the Trump campaign for further comment on Monday.
A Harris campaign official told CBS News, “Our campaign is vigilantly monitoring and protecting against cyber threats, and we are not aware of any security breaches in our systems.”
contributed to this report.