The hackers are accused of sending threatening messages to thousands of people after breaking into voter registration systems and a media company.
The Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers on Thursday for seeking to influence the 2020 election with a clumsy effort to intimidate voters, just a day after the nation’s cyberdefense authorities warned of an escalating Iranian effort to insert malicious code into the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure. The hackers, identified in a grand jury indictment handed up in New York as Seyyed Kazemi,24, and Sajjad Kashian,27, are accused of sending threatening messages to several thousand voters, after breaking into some voter registration systems and at least one media company. Many of the messages sent by the Iranians were designed to look like they were from the Proud Boys, the right-wing extremist group. Law enforcement officials said Facebook messages and emails from the Iranians to Republicans falsely claimed the Democrats were planning to exploit security vulnerabilities in state voter databases to register nonexistent voters. But the hackers also sent tens of thousands of emails to Democrats. They demanded recipients change their party affiliation and vote for President Donald J. Trump. The emails were so badly written, however, that they immediately seemed suspect, and the effort was quickly exposed by Mr. Trump’s own administration. Intelligence officials have long considered the emails to Democrats to be a bit of ham-handed reverse psychology, meant to make the recipients more likely to turn out to vote against Mr. Trump. Law enforcement officials also revealed Thursday that the Iranians had hacked into a media company that provides a content management system for dozens of newspapers, although officials did not reveal the name of the organization. Had they kept access, they might have been able to post fake stories to undermine the election, law enforcement officials said. But the F.B.I. detected the intrusion and notified the company. When the Iranians tried to enter the system the day after the election, they discovered their access was blocked.
