Former US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign claims it has been the victim of a cyberattack.

The claim was made after US outlet Politico reported that an anonymous email account sent them a dossier of information that originated from inside the campaign, but the entity that sent the documents refused to explain how they obtained the information. The New York Times claims that it was “a similar, if not identical, trove of data sent from an anonymous tipster who claimed to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Politico that the documents were “illegally obtained from foreign sources hostile to the United States” as part of a plan to interfere in the upcoming U.S. election. Cheung cited a Microsoft report published last week alleging that an Iranian crew sent a spear-phishing email to “a senior presidential campaign official” using a “compromised email account belonging to a former senior adviser.”

Microsoft did not disclose which campaign was the target of the activity it observed, but The Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign was the target of the activity Microsoft described.

The register has no evidence that the Iranian phishing expedition was successful, or was the source of the documents sent to Politico.

Infosec experts are almost always very cautious before attributing attacks to a particular entity. Cheung does not appear to have evidence that the leaked documents were the result of an action by a foreign actor.

Politico has said only that it has corresponded with the anonymous emailer. When asked how it obtained the documents, however, the organization was cagey.

No alternative theory has been put forward as to the origin of the documents, but there are numerous ways a document can be filtered out of an organization. Not all of them are the result of malicious actions.

Furthermore, many actors have motives for leaking information. While it is well known that many states seek to interfere in the domestic affairs of rivals, politics is often a dirty business – rival factions of a party leaking information to harm internal enemies is not unheard of. ®