Hacking claims as French go to the polls
Macron’s aides say a mix of fake and authentic documents released online.
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campain team says it has been the victim of a “massive hacking attack” after a trove of documents was released online.
The apparent hack came on late on Friday local time (yesterday NZT), the final day of campaigning in the French presidential election, with Macron, the centrist, facing Marine Le Pen, the far-Right candidate in tomorrow’s run-off. The result is expected to be known after 6am Monday NZT.
Campaign officials said authentic documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow “doubt and misinformation” and that it was a clear attempt to undermine Macron.
“The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information,” Macron’s En Marche! (Onwards!) party said in a statement.
“The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall not tolerate the vital interests of democracy being put at risk.”
Some 9 gigabytes of data from the campaign was posted online.
Someone on 4chan — a message board known for, among other things, elaborate hoaxes and political extremism — posted links to a large set of data.
WikiLeaks tweeted a link to the documents, saying it “contains many tens of thousands emails, photos, attachments up to April 24, 2017” — while indicating it was not responsible for the leak itself.
It’s hard to tell with so little time to evaluate the mass of material suddenly leaked whether the dump will have any impact on the outcome of the election.
From the start of Saturday in France, journalists and even ordinary citizens are legally required to pull back from any public election talk.
The Macron campaign statement
added that all the documents were
“lawful”.
For months pundits and journalists have worried over the possibility that a strategically timed leak could destabilise France’s election, a replay of the obsessively covered disclosures that some Americans blame for scuppering Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign last year and which others fear are sapping popular faith in Western democracy.
The French Interior Ministry said it would not comment on the alleged hacking attack.
“Neither the ministry, nor any other ministry would be commenting on this because according to the law, campaigning has ended as of midnight,” a spokesman said.
France’s election campaign commission was to hold a meeting last night to discuss the alleged attack.
It urged French media not to publish the documents, warning that some of them were “probably” fake.
Macron’s team has already complained about attempts to hack its systems during a fraught campaign, blaming Russian interests in part for the cyber attacks.
On April 26, the 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.
Russia’s state-funded RT television
and Sputnik news agency plan to sue Macron over accusations they mounted a smear campaign against him, the chief editor of RT and Sputnik, Margarita Simonyan, said yesterday.
“We’re sick of their lying. We’re going to sue,” Simonyan wrote on Twitter.
Opinion polls show Macron, the former Economy Minister who won the first round of voting, is set to beat far-right candidate Le Pen in the second round tomorrow in what is seen to be France’s most important election in decades.
He has led by around 60 per cent to 40 per cent in polls.
Yesterday, as the #Macronleaks hashtag buzzed around social media, Florian Philippot, deputy leader of the National Front, asked on Twitter; “Will Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism has deliberately killed?”
Macron spokesman Sylvain Fort, in a response on Twitter, called Philippot’s tweet “vile”.
Voting opens at 6pm today NZT.