The indictment details the efforts of the defendants to steal nonpublic Trump campaign materials and engage in a “hack-and-leak” operation.
On Sept. 26, a federal grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charged three members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in connection with their alleged hack of the Trump campaign. The court unsealed the indictment on Sept. 27.
According to the indictment, the defendants—Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri, and Yasar Balaghi—”engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign that used spearphishing and social engineering techniques to target and compromise the accounts of current and former U.S. government officials, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals associated with U.S. political campaigns.”
The indictment details the alleged efforts of the defendants—in addition to other actors “known and unknown” to the grand jury—to steal materials from the Trump campaign and weaponize that material against it. According to the indictment, the defendants leaked the materials to the media and other individuals who the defendants believed “were associated with what was then another identified U.S. presidential campaign.”
Read the indictment here
– Katherine Pompilio, Published courtesy of Lawfare.
