The Justice Department announced charges Thursday against two Iranians who are accused of helping to orchestrate a cyber-enabled campaign to intimidate and influence American voters in the 2020 election.
The campaign, which was first described by American intelligence officials in October 2020, involved emails to tens of thousands of registered voters purporting to be from the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. The emails threatened the recipients with physical injury unless they switched parties and voted for President Donald Trump.
The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, adds that the two Iranian defendants allegedly tried to compromise voter registration websites in eleven states, “to create the appearance that election results could not be trusted” by misrepresenting that the election web sites could accept fraudulent ballots, a senior Justice Department official told reporters in a conference call.
One attempt was successful, prosecutors say, and the pair got information on more than 100,000 voters. The targeted state was not identified.
The defendants were identified as Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian. The Department of State’s Rewards for Justice Program is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on or about Kazemi and Kashian’s activities, officials said.
The pair is also charged with creating and disseminating a video containing “disinformation about purported election infrastructure vulnerabilities,” and with hacking into an unnamed U.S. media company’s computer network, an attack that was thwarted before any false claims could be sent.
“This indictment details how two Iran-based actors waged a targeted, coordinated campaign to erode confidence in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system and to sow discord among Americans,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The allegations illustrate how foreign disinformation campaigns operate and seek to influence the American public. The department is committed to exposing and disrupting malign foreign influence efforts using all available tools, including criminal charges.”
The Iranians are not in custody, but the charges and sanctions will hamper their travel.
The campaign didn’t work — no voter registrations were changed, officials said.
The indictment does not attribute the campaign to the Iranian government, but intelligence officials have done so publicly.
The Justice Department identified Kazemi and Kashian as “experienced Iran-based computer hackers who worked as contractors for an Iran-based company formerly known as Eeleyanet Gostar, and now known as Emennet Pasargad.”
Eeleyanet Gostar is known to have provided services to the Iranian government, the Justice Department said in a news release.
Kazemi and Kashian are both charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, intimidate voters and transmit interstate threats, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; one count of voter intimidation, which carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison; and one count of transmission of interstate threats, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Kazemi is also charged with one count of unauthorized computer intrusion, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; and one count of knowingly damaging a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The Justice Department statement said the Treasury Department separately imposed sanctions on Emennet Pasargad, Kazemi, Kashian, and four other Iranian nationals who lead Emennet Pasargad.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
