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Meta said the activity was the handiwork of APT42, a hacking group that researchers widely believe is associated with an intelligence division inside Iran's military, which places surveillance software on the mobile phones of its victims. That software, according to researchers who follow the group, gives the team the ability to record calls and steal text messages, turning on cameras and microphones sneakily. Meta said it had discovered possible hacking attempts on the WhatsApp accounts of US officials—both from the current President Joe Biden and the former President Donald Trump administrations—and was attributing the acts to the very same Iranian hacker group revealed earlier this month to have compromised Trump's campaign. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp explained in a blog post that the attempt was only a "small cluster of likely social engineering activity on WhatsApp." These include a number of accounts masquerading as AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft technical support. It blocked the accounts after users reported the activity as suspicious and had not seen any evidence suggesting the targeted WhatsApp accounts had been compromised, it said. Meta said the activity was the handiwork of APT42, a hacking group that researchers widely believe is associated with an intelligence division inside Iran's military, which places surveillance software on the mobile phones of its victims. That software, according to researchers who follow the group, gives the team the ability to record calls and steal text messages, turning on cameras and microphones sneakily. The activity of the group is connected to efforts to breach US presidential campaigns that Microsoft and Google reported earlier this month, ahead of the US presidential election in November. The company blog did not mention the names of people targeted, saying only that the hackers "appeared to have focused on political and diplomatic officials, business and other public figures, some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump." It added that those figures were based in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Iran, the United States, and the United Kingdom. None
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