Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen
Dots have been joined, but hard evidence is not apparent
Former US president Donald Trump's re-election campaign has claimed it's been the victim of a cyber attack.
The claim was made after US outlet Politico reported an anonymous email account sent it a dossier of information sourced from within the campaign operation, but the entity who sent the docs declined to explain how they came by the info. The New York Times claims it was sent "a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico."
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Politico the documents were "obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States" as part of a plan to interfere in forthcoming US elections. Cheung mentioned a Microsoft report published last week that claims an Iranian crew sent a spear-phishing email to "a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign" using a "compromised email account of a former senior advisor."
Microsoft has not said which campaign was targeted by the activity it observed – but The Washington Post has reported the Trump campaign was the target of the activity Microsoft described.
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The Register is unaware of any evidence that the Iranian phishing expedition succeeded, or was the source of the documents sent to Politico.
Infosec experts are nearly always very cautious before attributing attacks to a particular entity. Cheung appears not to have evidence the leaked documents were the result of action by a foreign actor.
Politico has only said it has corresponded with the anonymous emailer, and that entity pushed back when asked to divulge how they came by the docs.
No alternative theory of the documents' origins has been advanced, yet there are myriad ways a document could be exfiltrated from an organization – not all of them the result of malicious action.
Further, many actors have motivations to leak info. While it is known that many states seek to meddle in rivals' domestic affairs, politics is often a dirty business – rival factions of a party leaking info to damage internal enemies is not an unheard of occurrence. ®