MACRON TEAM SEES U.S. STYLE HACKING IN POLLS

Thousands of emails, accounting documents put online

Paris, May 6: French Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s team blasted a “massive and coordinated hacking attack” against his campaign after a flood of internal documents were released online barely 24 hours before the election.

The centrist candidate’s furious staff said the release late on Friday of thousands of emails, accounting documents and other files was an attempt at “democratic destabilisation, like that seen during the last presidential campaign in the US”.

The documents spread on social media just before midnight on Friday — when 39-year-old Mr Macron and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen officially wrapped up campaigning for Sunday’s decisive runoff vote — with his aides calling the leak “unprecedented in a French electoral campaign”.

The leak, posted by someone calling themselves EMLEAKS, came as an 11th-hour twist in what has proved to be one of the most drama-packed elections in French history.

Mr Macron’s team said the files were stolen weeks ago when several officials from his En Marche party had their personal and work emails hacked — one of “an intense and repeated” series of cyber-attacks against Mr Macron since the launch of the campaign. “Clearly, the documents arising from the hacking are all lawful and show the normal functioning of a presidential campaign,” aides said in a statement.

But they warned that whoever was behind the leak had mixed fake documents with real ones “in order to sow doubt and disinformation”.

The WikiLeaks website posted a link on Twitter to the trove of documents, saying it was not responsible for the leak but that it was “examining” parts of the cache, amounting to around nine GB of data in total.

Senior Le Pen aide Florian Philippot suggested on Twitter that the leak might contain information that the media had deliberately suppressed.

The French election commission clled on “everyone on internet sites and social networks” and “all citizens, to show responsibility and not to pass on this content, so as not to distort the sincerity of the ballot.”

French President Francois Hollande has promised a response to the hacking.