There have been at least two and possibly three separate attacks on the Trump for President campaign in recent months. They may or may not be connected. At least one of the attacks appears to have originated overseas, with Iran being a probable culprit. Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone had his email account hacked. This led to a massive exposure of campaign documents that were subsequently leaked to the media.
On Monday, a possible DDOS attack on X servers derailed the Trump interview with Elon Musk. Musk believes that Iran is responsible, although he has supplied no evidence that's the case.
Another incident was a break-in at the Trump campaign office in Virginia. This was so amateurish (the "spy" was caught on security video, and nothing significant appears to be missing) that even the brain-dead lefties in the Harris campaign could have chosen a better thief to steal secrets from their opponents.
Harris campaign dirty tricks? Does the opposition have its own cyber-punk Donald Segretti running around sabotaging the Trump operation?
Probably not, although the 2024 campaign has already seen some very weird things, and we've still got three months to go.
The most serious breach was Roger Stone's email account getting penetrated, which apparently led the hackers to the email account used by a senior Trump campaign advisor. This, in turn, led to the leak of vetting information that the campaign used to select JD Vance as Trump's running mate.
Was Iran behind it? Intelligence points the finger at Tehran.
Iran has denied the allegations, and the US government has not publicly or officially pointed the finger at Iran. But the techniques used by the hackers to target the Trump campaign match those associated with Iranian hackers, according to one source familiar with the matter.
The news adds to growing evidence that Iranian operatives are mounting an aggressive effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election, overshadowing activity from the Russians. US intelligence officials last month warned of an ongoing covert social media campaign by Iran to undercut Trump’s candidacy and to increase “social discord” in the US ahead of the November election. That activity has included creating fake news sites targeting liberal and conservative voters, according to Microsoft.
The US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has also accused Iran of attempting to covertly stoke protests in the US related to the Israel-Hamas conflict by posing as activists online and in some cases providing financial support to protesters.
Musk claims that a DDOS attack derailed the 45 minutes of his interview with Donald Trump. The left-wing tech site The Verge claims there wasn't any attack at all, citing two unnamed X employees who threw their boss under the bus:
18 minutes after the conversation was supposed to begin, Musk claimed that X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that had made it impossible for the Space to proceed as planned.
The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Elon was lying about an attack.
The fact that the rest of X continued to work does not rule out an attack targeting a specific platform segment.
However, it would not be the first time a major event on X has suffered technical problems. In 2023, technical glitches also plagued the launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's presidential campaign.
The burglary of Trump's Loudon County, Va., campaign office was amateurish but no joke. The unidentified crook was dressed in black and appeared to have walked out with files of some kind.
The Trump campaign shares the space with the local GOP organization.
BREAKING: Trump campaign office in Ashburn, Virginia was broken into.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 12, 2024
Police are searching for this man who burglarized the campaign office. Anyone with information is asked to contact authorities at 571-918-1869 pic.twitter.com/atOoAw6tYi
What, if anything, can the government do to safeguard the Trump campaign? Cyber security is the responsibility of the campaigns, but U.S. intelligence can act if they receive actionable information on who is targeting the campaign and from where. Maybe turning off the lights in Tehran for a few days might get Iran to lay off. Or, as Israel did with the Stuxnet worm, we might launch our own cyber attack on Iranian systems. Crashing their centrifuges again would set back their nuclear program a few months.
Related: The Trump Campaign Is a Victim of a Foreign Hack. Is Iran Behind It?
The Trump campaign has already tightened its internet security, and beyond that, there's not much more it can do to safeguard its secrets.
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