‘Dumb mistake’ exposed Iranian hand behind fake Proud Boys US election emails: Sources

Government analysts and private sector investigators were able to rapidly attribute to Iranian hackers a wave of thousands of threatening emails aimed at US voters because of mistakes made in a video attached to some of the messages, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Those failures provided a rare opportunity for the US government to identify and publicly announce blame for a malicious cyber operation in a matter of days, something that usually requires months of technical analysis and supporting intelligence.

“Either they made a dumb mistake or wanted to get caught,” said a senior US government official, who asked not to be identified. “We are not concerned about this activity being some kind of false flag due to other supporting evidence. This was Iran.”