US officials say they thwarted Iran efforts to interfere with American election 

Iran is the latest country to be accused of interfering with the US election. Officials within the National Security Agency and Cyber Command told CNN that they carried out operations against the Islamic Republic as part of a broader effort to protect the 2020 election from foreign interference.

The operation targeted Iranian hackers working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps according to a Washington Post report which provided details of the operation. The IRGC came under the radar of US officials after they carried out an attack last month posing as a far-right group known as the Proud Boys.

Threatening emails were sent to American voters, the official said. Videos aimed at driving down confidence in the voting process, were also posted online, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the operation’s sensitivity.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, who leads both the NSA and the military’s cyber command, did not address any specific operation yesterday but is reported saying in the Post that he was “very confident in actions” taken against adversaries “over the past several weeks and the past several months to make sure that they’re not going to interfere in our elections.”

Nakasone said the NSA had been watching the Iranians for a while and was not caught off guard. “We had a very, very good bead on what a number of actors were trying to do,” he said. “We provided early warning and followed [them very closely]. We weren’t surprised by their actions.”

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A US official also told CNN on Monday that US Cyber Command expanded its operations aimed at identifying malicious foreign cyber actors before yesterday’s election, conducting missions to not only seek out Russian hackers, but those from all major adversaries, including Iran and China.

Trump’s victory in 2016 pushed the issue of foreign interference in US election to the top of the political agenda. The focus of investigations since has been America’s traditional enemies but observers have also exposed interference by pro-Israel groups that often goes unmentioned in the mainstream media.

US Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for example were subjected to far-right, Islamophobic fake news. A report on this found 21 far-right Facebook pages were used to disseminate hate-fuelled disinformation to more than one million followers across the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, Austria, Israel and Nigeria.

READ: Facebook says suspected Iranian hackers behind US election threats operated in 2019