Microsoft disclosed evidence that a group of hackers from Iran attempted to access email accounts belonging to a 2020 presidential candidate. The group responsible is named Phosphorous and they did not succeed in compromising the candidates email group. Microsoft said that its threat intelligence center observed the group making over 2,700 attempts to identify email accounts and then go on to attack 241 of them.
Phosphorous attempted to obtain access to the secondary email accounts linked to the Microsoft ones in order to break into them. The attacks were said to be not technically sophisticated but they did attempt to use a significant amount of personal information belonging to their targets. Phone numbers associated with the users were also a primary target but were not successful.