Iran phishing attacks detected ahead of election

In an online statement, the firm said it had noticed a "significant jump" in the region's overall volume of phishing activity in the last three weeks.

The timing and targets suggested the attacks were "politically motivated".

Friday's poll is the first since 2009 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a controversial second term.

The election had triggered angry protests, with voters accusing Mr Ahmadinejad's camp of rigging the results in his favour.

Google's vice-president of security engineering, Eric Grosse, said the phishing attacks originated from within Iran.

Phishing attempts to obtain passwords and other private computing information by directing users to fake websites.

"For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of thousands of Iranian users," he said.

"The timing and targeting of the campaigns suggest that the attacks are politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday."

Mr Grosse said victims targeted in the attacks had received an email containing a link to a web page purporting to perform account maintenance.

If they clicked the link, they were taken to a fake Google sign-in page, which would steal their username and password.

Mr Grosse warned Iranian users to take extra measures to protect their accounts from "state-sponsored attacks".

Most of the six candidates in Friday's election are conservatives close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

The opposition says more than 80 of its supporters were killed in a crackdown over the following six months, a figure the government disputes. Several have been sentenced to death, and dozens jailed.

The two reformist candidates from 2009 - Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi - remain under house arrest.