⁍ ‘Either they made a dumb mistake or wanted to get caught,’ said a senior U.S. government official.

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⁍ Attribution to Iranian hackers does not necessarily mean a group is working at the behest of the government there.

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⁍ Iranian officials denied the U.S. allegations.

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– A video that purports to show members of the far-right “Proud Boys” hacking into a voter registration system has given the US government a rare opportunity to publicly identify Iranian hackers as the ones behind a wave of threatening emails aimed at American voters, sources tell Reuters. “Either they made a dumb mistake or wanted to get caught,” says a senior US government official. “We are not concerned about this activity being some kind of false flag due to other supporting evidence. This was Iran.” The video, which has since been taken down, appeared to come from an official-looking Proud Boys email address, but security analysts were unable to obfuscate the computer code that appeared in the video, the sources say. Analysts then cross-referenced those clues with data from other intelligence streams, including communications interceptions, the government official says. “This public disclosure of attribution to Iran by the government has been done with breakneck speed, compared to the usual process that takes months and often years,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, a co-founder and former chief technology officer of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. A Google spokesperson said Thursday the company was in contact with the FBI. Iranian officials denied the US allegations. “These accusations are nothing more than another scenario to undermine voter confidence in the security of the US election, and are absurd,” says Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York.