DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran has proven to be a double concern for the United States as the end of the presidential campaign approaches.
Prosecutors allege Tehran tried to hack numbers associated with the election, stealing information from former President Donald Trump’s campaign. And US officials have accused it plans to kill Trump and other ex-officials.
For Iran, assassination plots and hacking are not new strategies.
Iran saw the value and danger of hacking in the early 2000s when the Stuxnet virus, believed to be deployed by Israel and the US, attempted to damage Iran’s nuclear program. Since then, hackers attributed to state-related operations have targeted the Trump campaign, Iranian expats and government officials at home.
The history of murders goes back further. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran killed or kidnapped perceived enemies living abroad.
A look at Iran’s history of attacking opponents:
For many, Iran’s behavior can be traced back to the emergence of the Stuxnet computer virus. Released in the 2000s, Stuxnet wormed its way into control units for uranium-enriching centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear power plant, causing them to speed up and eventually self-destruct.
Iranian scientists initially thought mechanical faults caused the damage. But Iran eventually removed the affected equipment and found its own way to attack enemies online.
“Iran had an excellent teacher in the emerging art of cyberwarfare,” said a 2020 report from the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia.
That was acknowledged by the National Security Agency in a document leaked to The Intercept by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2015, which examined a cyberattack that destroyed hard drives at the Saudi state oil company. Iran is suspected of carrying out that attack, called Shamoon, in 2012 and again in 2017.
“Iran, which suffered a similar cyberattack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others,” the document said.
There were also domestic considerations. In 2009, the controversial re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to protests by the Green Movement. Twitter, a source of news about the demonstrations, discovered that its website had been defaced by the self-proclaimed “Iranian Cyber Army.” There is suspicion that the Revolutionary Guards, a major power base within the Iranian theocracy, monitored the “cyber army” and other hackers.
Meanwhile, Iran itself has been hacked repeatedly in embarrassing incidents. They include the masses closure of gas stations throughout Iran, as well surveillance cameras in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison and even state television broadcasts.
Iranian hacking attacks, given their low cost and high reward, are likely to continue as Iran faces a tense international environment Israel’s conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah, that of Iran enrichment of uranium to near-weapons levels and the prospect of Trump becoming president again.
The growth of 3G and 4G mobile internet services in Iran has also made it easier for the public – and potential hackers – to access the internet. Iran has more than 50 major universities with computer science or information technology programs. At least three of Iran’s top schools are believed to have ties to Iran’s Defense Ministry and Guard, providing potential hackers for the security forces.
Iranian hacking attempts on US targets are included banks and even a small dam near New York City – attacks US prosecutors linked to the Guard.
While Russia is seen as the biggest foreign threat to the U.S. election, officials are concerned about Iran. The hacking attempts during the presidential campaign were based on phishing, with many deceptive emails sent in the hope that some recipients would inadvertently give them access to sensitive information.
Amin Sabeti, a digital security expert who focuses on Iran, said the tactic is working.
“It’s scalable, it’s cheap and you don’t need any skills because you put, I don’t know, five crazy hard-line people in an office in Tehran and then send out tens of thousands of emails. If they get 10, it’s enough,” he said.
For Iran, hacks targeting the US offer the prospect of causing chaos, undermining Trump’s campaign and obtaining classified information.
“I’ve lost count of how many attempts have been made on my emails and social media since it’s been going on for over a decade,” said Holly Dagres, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who once email briefly hacked by Iran. “The Iranians are not targeting me because I have useful information in my inbox or direct messages. Instead, they hope to use my name and connection to the think tank to attack others and ultimately get through to high-ranking U.S. government officials who could have useful information and intelligence related to Iran.”
Iran has vowed to take revenge on Trump and others in his former administration over the 2020 drone strike that killed the prominent president. Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
In July, authorities said they learned of this an Iranian threat against Trump and increases safety. Iran has not been linked to Trump’s assassination attempts in Florida and Pennsylvania. A Pakistani man who spent time in Iran was recently indicted by federal prosecutors on alleged conspiracy charges murders in the USincluding possibly also from Trump.
Officials are taking the Iranian threat seriously, given Iran has targeted adversaries in the past.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini indicated how Iran would target perceived enemies, saying, “Islam grew with blood.”
“The great prophet of Islam had the Quran in one hand and a sword in the other – a sword to suppress traitors,” Khomeini said.
Even before you get one network of allied militias in the Middle EastIran is suspected of targeting opponents abroad, starting with members of the former government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Attention shifted to perceived opponents of the theocracy, both within the country itself the mass executions of 1988 and abroad.
Outside Iran, so-called ‘chain killings’ have been targeted by activists, journalists and other critics. A prominent incident linked to Iran was a shooting at a restaurant in Germany that left three Iranian Kurdish figures and a translator dead. In 1997, a German court implicated Iran’s top leaders in the shooting, prompting most European Union countries to withdraw their ambassadors.
Afterwards, targeted killings in Iran decreased but did not stop. US prosecutors link Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to a 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Meanwhile, a suspected Israeli assassination campaign targeted scientists of Iran’s nuclear program.
In 2015, Iran signed a nuclear deal in which the country sharply reduced its enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Two years later, Trump was elected and promised to unilaterally withdraw America from the agreement. As companies pulled out of Iran, Tehran renewed a campaign to target adversaries abroad, but this time capture them and take them to Iran for trial.
Belgium arrested an Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, in 2018 and eventually convicted him of devising a foiled bomb attack against an exiled Iranian opposition group. Iran has also increasingly turned to criminal gangs for some efforts, such as what US prosecutors have described as plots to kill people kidnapping of opposition activist Masih Alinejad.
Among the victims following Soleimani’s death was former US National Security Advisor John Bolton. The US has offered a reward of up to $20 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a Revolutionary Guard member it says plotted to kill Bolton for $300,000.
An FBI agent quoted Guard Gen. Esmail Ghaani as saying in a 2022 court filing: “Where necessary, we retaliate against Americans with the help of people on their side and in their own homes without our presence.”