We know that the threat of getting hacked or exposing something is everywhere and it becomes extremely serious when it happens in an election campaign because of the fact that elections are the best part of a democracy and if that is also rigged, there is nowhere to go for people in electing someone who they did not vote for in the first place. We have seen reports where it is being said that Russian hackers were behind electing the current US President Donald Trump to the office by interfering in the election campaign and spreading fake news about his opponents.
Now, Google has released a new statement and once again, the 2020 election campaign for the US presidency is going on while the voting for the same will take place later this year. The company has now revealed that both Trump and Joe Biden who is the candidate against the current US President were targeted by hackers from Iran and China. These hackers had interfered in their election campaigns and even targeted the people included in this campaign such as their staffers.
Google’s head of TAG says that “Recently TAG saw China APT group targeting Biden campaign staff & Iran APT targeting Trump campaign staff with phishing,” But the main thing to note is that these hackers targeted the campaigns “unsuccessfully” meaning that no important information was compromised.
Google’s TAG head says that groups which targeted the US campaigns “are APT31 (targeted Biden) and APT35 (targeted Trump)”. As for APT31, it is also known as Zirconium and is said to be a “Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that has been active since at least early 2016”. Also, a Microsoft threat analyst says the group “has seen a surge of activity recently and has been very active over the past 45 days” once this statement from Google came out.
