French Presidential Campaign Sees Breach Similar to Hack that Plagued American Election
Just days ahead of the French Presidential Election, candidate and now France’s president-elect announced his campaign had been hacked.
Shortly before cinching the win and being named France’s President-Elect, Emmanuel Macron fell victim to a “massive and coordinated hacking operation” his campaign team said. The denounced the attack as a last-ditch effort to undermine him before the vote on Sunday, May 7.
The document dump happened on Friday night, less than 48 hours before the country voted in the final round of the presidential election, which pitted independent centrist Macron against far-right candidate Marine La Pen.
The files were released via fake social media accounts and contained around 14.5 gigabytes of emails and personal and business documents. American news sources have found links to more than 70,000 files posted to a text-sharing site, Pastebin.
Officials from Macron’s campaign said that fake documents had been mixed in with authentic documents in the data dump to create “confusion and misinformation.”
A statement from En Marche!, Macron’s campaign, officials said that the leak happened in the last hours of the campaign.
“This operation is clearly meant to undermine democracy, just like what happened in the US during the last presidential campaign,” the statement read.
It is not clear who was behind the document dump, but the hack targeting Macron’s campaign used methods similar to the suspected Russian hacks of the Democratic National Committee last year.