US activists amplify Macron leaks
UNITED STATES: American farRIght activists helped amplify a leak of hacked emails belonging to leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign, some researchers said yesterday, with automated bots and the Twitter account of WikiLeaks also propelling a leak that came two days before France’s presidential vote.
The rapid spread on Twitter, Facebook and the messaging forum 4chan of emails and other campaign documents that Macron’s campaign said on Saturday had been stolen recalled the effort by Right-wing activists and Russian state media to promote hacked documents embarrassing to Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last year.
It also renewed questions whether social media companies have done enough to limit fake accounts or spammed content on their platforms and how media organisations should report on hacked information.
Twitter declined to comment on whether it had taken any specific action in response to the Macron leak. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
Analysis conducted by The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that the hashtag #MacronLeaks reached 47,000 tweets in t31⁄2 hours after it was first used by Jack Posobiec, a writer in Washington for the farRight news organisation The Rebel.
Posobiec’s online biography said he co-ordinated grassroots organising for a group that supported US President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Posobiec’s initial tweet on the Macron documents was retweeted 15 times within one minute and 87 times in five minutes, Atlantic Council senior fellow Ben Nimmo wrote in a blog. Posobiec is prolific on Twitter, where he has a large following of more than 100,000 accounts.
Posobiec said he did not operate bots and he used his account to share a post he saw on 4chan.
Bots helped move the hashtag from the US to France, according to Nimmo, where surveys show far-Right leader Marine Le Pen trailing Macron by more than 20 points heading into today’s election.
French electoral law forbids candidates from commenting from the day before an election until polling stations close.
WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published hacked emails belonging to Democrats during the 2016 presidential election, provided the largest boost of attention on Twitter to the Macron emails, Nimmo said.
The group did not publish the information itself but tweeted about the leak at least 15 times.
Some researchers also observed the use of identical phrasing in blogs about the leaks, which they alleged was aimed at driving Alphabet Inc’s Google search result rankings.
About nine gigabytes of data purporting to be documents from the Macron campaign were posted on Pastebin, a site that allows anonymous document sharing.
Other recent high-profile political leaks, including those during the US presidential election last year, have often been dumped by WikiLeaks.
The US cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint said on Saturday that an initial review of the Macron leaks indicated that APT 28, a group tied to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, may be behind the leak, though evidence was not conclusive.
But other cyber researchers said that analysis was premature, and Western security officials were cautious about assigning any attribution.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied accusations it has attempted to use cyber attacks to meddle in either the French or US elections. – Reuters