How Iran is mimicking Russia’s US election influence attempts

National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe's hastily arranged press conference last week highlighted Iran as a major threat to the integrity of US elections on par with Russia.

Mr Ratcliffe said that Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democratic-leaning voters by hijacking the domain of the extremist group Proud Boys, which supports President Donald Trump.

He also raised eyebrows with his claim that Iran’s goal was not only to “incite social unrest,” but also to “damage President Trump.”

Iran’s phishing and spoofing attempts, coupled with a relatively new interest in exploiting American cultural divisions, have become more sophisticated in recent years.

Still, Iran has made a series of amateurish mistakes in recent years and Tehran has not enjoyed the same level of success as Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 election by hacking and releasing emails from top Democratic officials.

“They were more sophisticated, and Russia has a more culturally attuned eye to the sort of specifically divisive political issues in the United States – like between Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives matter,” said Michael Sexton, the director of the Washington-based Middle East Institute’s cybersecurity initiative.

“Iran does not intuitively have that same kind of situational awareness,” he said.

“They’re getting better at it. They’ve improved over the years and they’ve been showing decent sophistication this year.”

Taking a page out of Russia’s 2016 playbook, Iran also sought to hack Mr Trump’s presidential campaign last year, albeit unsuccessfully.

“Iran is under enormous pressure from the sanctions regime,” said Mr Sexton.

“I can’t imagine that they would get a free pass under Joe Biden, but it’s quite apparent that the policy of the United States is almost like surrender at nothing but complete capitulation, and the cost-benefit analysis of a Biden administration is certainly better.”

Tehran has also struggled with the technical nuts and bolts needed to replicate Russia’s 2016 success.

US officials were quickly able to trace the fraudulent Proud Boys email back to Iran-linked hackers due to file paths, file names and an internet protocol address the hackers left in a video embedded in the email, Reuters reported last week.

And Microsoft announced Wednesday that it had detected an Iranian effort to hack more than 100 high-profile attendees of the upcoming Munich Security Conference in Germany and the Think 20 Summit in Saudi Arabia.

Facebook and Twitter have both shuttered thousands of fake accounts linked to an online Iranian influence campaign meant to influence US public opinion on foreign policy issues as the Iran nuclear deal and the Yemen civil war.

But Iran’s various missteps, coupled with a heightened vigilance against foreign election interference, have made it more difficult to significantly influence the US election.

“The FBI, the intelligence community, are just starting to wake up and realise that Russia was doing this, whereas right now, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft all expect this threat and are working to counteract it,” said Mr Sexton.

“Iran in a way has sort of a steeper hill to climb than Russia did.”

The cybersecurity firm IBM X-Force announced in July that they had obtained five hours of footage showing Iranian-linked hackers engaged in relatively simple phishing attempts.

The hackers had accidentally leaked the footage while stealing data from US and Greek military personnel, US State Department staff and an Iranian American philanthropist.

The US Justice Department unmasked several Iranian hackers in September as part of three separate indictments in an alleged attempt to steal American aerospace and satellite tracking data.

Still, Tehran could use a technic called “perception hacking” to leave the American public with the impression that Tehran’s capabilities are more formidable than they actually are.

Although Iran was able to identify Democratic-leaning voters to email by using open source voter registration data, the fake Proud Boys email left voters with the impression that Tehran had access to voter rolls.

Mr Sexton said perception hacking could involve “hacking voter rolls or voting machines in a couple of specific locations and not actually doing anything, but leaving just enough of a footprint that it leaves enough people wondering if the election was legitimate or not.”