WASHINGTON - For the third presidential election in a row, foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest.

       On Aug 9, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake e-mail messages, known as “spear phishing”, to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

       By the night of Aug 10, former president Donald Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government – Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information”. He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalisation, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.

       The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what – if anything – the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.

       Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Aug 10 that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.

       The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who e-mailed the documents to Politico.

       There is little doubt, investigators say, that the Iranians want to see Trump defeated. As president, he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposed economic sanctions on Iran and then, in January 2020, ordered the killing in Iraq of Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, a clandestine wing of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for foreign operations.

       Trump often casts his actions against Iran as evidence of his strength, despite the fact that his exit from the Iran deal gave Tehran an opening to rebuild a nuclear programme that had been hobbled by the 2015 agreement. NYTIMES