Title: Unveiling Operation Mint Sandstorm: Iran’s Cyber Warfare Against US Political Officials

wanted to talk about Operation Mint Sandstorm which is basically being run by Iran and they have hacked both of the administrations of former President Trump and current President Biden and basically what they’re doing is they’re using WhatsApp um to purposely target political individuals diplomatic individuals people they have on their list they’re using really 10 accounts to target dozens of people so that’s not a lot and they’re posing as as as like tech support for for Google uh for Microsoft and then they’re building a relationship with these individuals that they’re targeting in the hopes that those individuals will then give them information and so basically what this is is is part of a this is a fishing scam related to social engineering and that is basically manipulating people into divulging personal information but in this case information related to the campaigns or related to the presidency related to foreign policy whatever it is that they’re looking to do and the reason that this was stopped was because the users of those WhatsApp accounts were extremely vigilant and were reporting reporting reporting um any suspicious activity so I know that you know we talk about these big fancy ways to stop a lot of these cyber attacks but really it starts with us quite frankly uh in terms of reporting these things and really they’ve been targeting um people related to Israel Palestine US UK um and and these campaigns and so this has been going on for quite some time I have talked about Iran before in terms of misinformation and in terms of hacking some people have sort of said oh just let them we we’re entitled to know all of this information this is this is not misinformation that I think we’re talking about in terms of different political sides um on the media this is an act of war um and we need to look at it as such if someone came into this country physically and started targeting members of Trump’s uh cabinet when he was President Biden’s cabinet we would not be okay with that and we wouldn’t be okay with just letting the information out there this is an act of cyber war by another country and we need to be treating it as such