Left-wing French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron has been hit by a
Left-wing French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron has been hit by a « massive and coordinated » hack attack just before voters go to the polls. A 9GB cache of emails and photos was dumped as a torrent on Pastebin by a leaker by the name of EMLEAKS. The torrent was initially hosted on Archive.org.
It was quickly pulled offline, but not before it had spread far and wide on social media. Released just before midnight on Friday night, the leak was timed to prevent Macron from responding. French election rules forbid candidates from engaging in any form of campaigning immediately before poll open.
While Macron’s « En Marche! » campaign team has said that at least some of the files contained in the leak are not genuine, it has still been described as an attempt to throw « doubt and misinformation » over Macron. The former member of the Socialist Party is due to go head-to-head with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen when French voters cast their votes on Sunday.
Not only is Macron unable to respond to the leaks, but French news outlets have been warned against publishing the contents of the emails in case this interferes with the course of the election. Despite attempts to stem the flow of the emails online, WikiLeaks — which says it is not responsible for the leak — points out that the archive is still available online:
The group also used a tweet to question just how the Macron team had been able to determine so quickly that the archive included fake documents:
En Marche! says that it became the « victim of a massive and coordinated hack […] which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information. » It says that the genuine documents so no signs of wrong-doing, just « the normal functioning of an election campaign. » The finger of blame has been pointed at Russia, and the spread of the leak through the site much loved by right-wing groups, 4chan, as well as pro-Trump accounts on Twitter does little to discourage this line of thinking. The suspicion is fortified by news from security firm Trend Micro that a Russian hacking group had been targeting the Macron campaign
Image credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock
