The French presidential forerunner made the eleventh hour announcement at 11.56pm – four minutes before journalists were banned from reporting anything.
Emmanuel Macron announced Russian hackers launched a ‘massive and coordinated’ bid to destabilise his campaign just moments before a ban on media reports liable to affect the presidential race.
Nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting.
The French presidential forerunner made the eleventh hour announcement at 11.56pm – four minutes before the legal prohibition on campaigning was put in place.
Hacked documents included emails, accounting documents and contracts – all legal – from his political movement En Marche! (Onwards!) .
En Marche! said that several of its leaders had their emails hacked last week but the attackers bundled them with fake emails and delayed posting them for maximum effect.
Both candidates and French national media were not allowed by law from midnight last night to discuss the presidential campaign until after the French people have voted.
Numerama, a French online publication focusing on digital life, said that the hacked material appeared to have been disseminated through users of 4Chan, an online bulletin board.
It states the ‘banal’ documents were held on a hard disk with details of email addresses of associates and political officials of En Marche!
It claims to have found invoices, references and personal exchanges about the weather and an email confirming an edition of a novel and a restaurant reservation.
The news website states: ‘We have downloaded the documents and while it is impossible for us scour them fully in a realistic time frame, it is not in doubt that the documents appear real, compared with numerous fake documents which have been floating around and which were sent out by the Front National in the past few days.
‘It will take time to verify these documents but on first site the documents appear to banal.’
Macron’s team said: ‘The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information.
‘The files were obtained several weeks ago thanks to the hacking of personal and professional mailboxes of several leaders of the En Marche! movement.
‘Those who circulate these documents add a number of false documents to genuine documents in order to sow doubt and disinformation.
‘The hackers’ ambition is obviously to harm the movement En Marche! A few hours of the second round of the French presidential election.
‘Obviously, the documents from piracy are all legal and reflect the normal operation of a presidential campaign.
‘Their dissemination makes internal data public but there is no concern about the legality and the conformity of the documents.
‘It is not a mere piracy operation but an attempt to destabilize the French presidential election.’
France’s election campaign commission will hold a meeting this morning to discuss the hacking attack. It urged French media not to publish the documents, warning that some of them were ‘probably’ fake.
Former economy minister Macron’s team has previously complained about attempts to hack its emails during a fraught campaign, blaming Russian interests for the cyber attacks.
President Vladimir Putin, previously accused of interfering in last year’s US polls, is said to favour anti-EU candidate Marine Le Pen whose election would contribute to the further destabilisation of the Union, something which he dreams about at night.
On April 26, Macron’s team said it had been the target of a series of attempts to steal email credentials since January, but that the perpetrators had so far failed to compromise any campaign data.
In February, the Kremlin denied that it was behind any such attacks, even though Macron’s camp renewed complaints against Russian media and a hackers’ group operating in Ukraine.
It comes two days before voters go to the polls to choose the country’s next president in a run-off with Marine Le Pen.
While one poll puts Macron 60 points ahead, an Ifop poll says he leads Le Pen 63 per cent to 37 per cent. Four other surveys show Macron on 62 and Le Pen on 38.
This margin is not as big as the one that centre-right candidate Jacques Chirac beat Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen by in 2002, gaining 82.2 per cent versus the 17.8 per cent of Le Pen.
Ms Le Pen’s National Front party has – significantly – not even announced where their candidate will be after polls close on Sunday evening following the second and final round of voting.
On the last day of campaigning yesterday, one of Mr Macron’s aides said: ‘The Louvre will be the venue for our election night party in case of victory.’
Crowds will gather on the esplanade by the glass pyramid at the centre of the historic complex, which dates back to the 12th Century, and was once the home of French Royalty.
En Marche! – Mr Macron’s political movement – had originally wanted to use the Champs de Mars, in front of the Eiffel Tower, but this was turned down.
The Champs is at the centre of Paris’s Olympic bid for 2024, and there were fears that thousands of people would destroy the grass lawns.
In contrast, the area around the Louvre is cobbled or concreted, and always full of people.
The museum, which contains masterpieces including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, is the biggest in the world, and welcomes more than 7million visitors a year.
Previous new presidents have chosen more modest venues, such as restaurants or campaign headquarters.
Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen have been involved in an increasingly bitter contest, accusing each other of being unfit to live up to the grandeur of the French presidency.
Paris prosecutors have just opened an investigation into suggestions by Ms Le Pen that her rival – a former merchant banker – has a hidden offshore bank account in the Bahamas.
