Iranian Hackers Targeted Trump’s Re-election Campaign

SAN FRANCISCO — Iranian hackers targeted President Trump’s re-election campaign, according to two people with knowledge of the attacks, in a sign of how cyberattacks could become a fixture of the 2020 presidential election.

News that Mr. Trump’s campaign was an Iranian target came just hours after Microsoft said in a report that hackers, with apparent backing from Iran’s government, had made more than 2,700 attempts to identify the email accounts of current and former United States government officials, journalists covering political campaigns and accounts associated with a presidential campaign.

The two people, who were not allowed to publicly discuss the investigation into the hacks, said it was not clear what information was taken in the attack on the Trump campaign. While Microsoft did not name Iran’s targets in its report, it found evidence that hackers successfully infiltrated email inboxes in at least four cases.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement that “we have no indication that any of our campaign infrastructure was targeted.”

The Iranian attack is the latest indication that cyberattacks and disinformation are likely to play a major role in the 2020 presidential campaign, as they did four years ago.

But the incentives to influence the election are likely to be very different than they were in 2016 when Russian hackers infiltrated the computer networks of Democrats and Republicans, then selectively leaked and disseminated Democrats’ emails, including those of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, in an effort to harm Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

In addition to Iran, hackers from North Korea and Russia have already started actively targeting organizations that work closely with 2020 presidential candidates.

No representatives for other presidential candidates said on Friday that their campaigns had been targeted.

The news that Iranian hackers targeted Mr. Trump came as his administration continues to weigh a cyberstrike against Iran to punish Tehran for what White House officials charge was an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities last month.

Iran’s targeting of Mr. Trump is part of a much broader Iranian campaign, according to the Microsoft report, which found that hackers had tried to attack 241 accounts, using fairly unsophisticated means. The hackers appeared to have used information available about their victims online to discover their passwords. It was unclear what information they stole.

For weeks, officials from the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency have said they are particularly concerned about Iranian-backed attacks. Their worries stemmed from rising tensions over new sanctions on Iran and nascent Iranian activity in the 2018 midterm elections.

While the officials said they believed that all the American presidential candidates were likely targets, President Trump’s campaign has long been considered a prime target.

It was Mr. Trump who abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran last year, and who has ramped up sanctions to the point that Iran’s oil revenues have dropped sharply. The United States has also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group. The I.R.G. oversees the nuclear program and, by some accounts, Iran’s best hacking group, its Cyber Corps.

But it is not clear whether the group Microsoft identified reports to the Cyber Corps or is made up, deliberately, of freelancers and others whose affiliations are harder to trace.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.