The FBI said late Wednesday that Russia and Iran had taken measures to undermine US confidence in the upcoming elections.
National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said both countries received some voter registration data that Iran used to send fake emails to intimidate voters.
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"These data can be used by foreign actors to try to provide registered voters with false information that they hope will create confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy," Ratcliffe said at a hastily convened press conference on Wednesday evening.
Ratcliffe said Iran's fake emails were "designed to intimidate voters, incite civil unrest and harm President Donald Trump". Iran has also been linked to a video indicating that individuals can cast fraudulent ballots overseas, he said.
It is unclear how Iran and Russia obtained the voter registration information, although much of it is there publicly available in several statesand others were in the past exposed to data breaches. FBI Director Chris Wray said during the conference that having access to voter registration data doesn't mean your votes can or will be changed.
"We have worked as a community for years to build the resilience of our electoral infrastructure, and today that infrastructure remains resilient," Wray said. "You should be sure that your vote counts."
It is unclear how many people received these intimidating emails from Iranian voters, although researchers from cybersecurity firm FireEye said it was targeting democratic voters in four states.
"In recent years, Iranian intelligence operations have consistently crossed borders with bold and innovative approaches. However, this incident represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of Iran's willingness to interfere in the democratic process," said John Hultquist, Senior Director of Analysis at FireEye. "While many of their operations have focused on promoting propaganda in pursuit of Iranian interests, this incident is clearly aimed at undermining voter confidence."
Hultquist added that the campaign was designed to fuel existing tensions and allay fears that election security was vulnerable.
An email campaign targeting Democratic voters in Florida on Tuesday and Wednesday claimed "had access to all voting infrastructure" and aimed to intimidate people into voting for Donald Trump. The email addresses, forged to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, contained a video claiming to have completed voter registration and mailed ballot papers for voters in Florida, Alaska and Arizona.
Unlike other disinformation campaigns that used social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to spread foreign influence in elections as much as possible, this campaign was targeted directly to voters via email. While the bogus campaign of intimidation by Proud Boys voters complies with the Justice Department's warning against Iran and Russia on Wednesday, authorities did not confirm whether the efforts were the same.
Legislators and electoral officials find that these emails are a form of intimidation for voters and do not reflect the actual state of electoral security. On Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and vice-chairman, Mark Warner, D-Virginia, released a joint statement on the security of voter infrastructure.
"Our opponents overseas are trying to wreak havoc and undermine voters' belief in our democratic institutions, including the electoral systems and infrastructure we rely on to record and properly report expressions of voter will," Rubio said and Warner. "They may be trying to target these systems or they may simply appear to have altered or tampered with these systems in order to undermine their credibility and our trust in them."
Tensions between Iran and the US escalated earlier this year after US military strikes in response to a missile attack that killed an American civil contractor on an Iraqi military base. The Iranian government promised to fight back and cybersecurity experts warned that Iran could choose a cyberattack to get revenge on the US.
US officials have already warned of a rampant disinformation campaign from China, Russia and Iran to influence the 2020 presidential election. Officials have warned that these efforts could include creating fake websites to display unofficial election "winners", hacking existing poll tracking websites to alter the results, or spreading disinformation on social media to see the result in To ask a question.
