France’s election campaign commission said Saturday “a significant amount of data” – and some fake information – has been leaked on social networks following a hacking attack on centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign.
The leak came 36 hours before the nation votes Sunday in a crucial presidential runoff between Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen – and just as a two-day blackout on campaigning began so that voters could reflect on their choice.
The leaked documents appear largely mundane, and the perpetrators remain unknown. It’s unclear whether the document dump will dent Macron’s large polling lead over Le Pen going into the vote.
The election commission met Saturday after the leaks emerged just before midnight Friday. The commission said the leaked data apparently came from Macron’s “information systems and mail accounts from some of his campaign managers.” It said the leaked data had been “fraudulently” obtained and that fake news was probably mingled in with it.
The Macron team asked the campaign oversight commission Saturday to bring in cybersecurity agency ANSSI to study the hack, according to a government official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the details publicly.
ANSSI can only be called in for cases where the cyberattack is “massive and sophisticated” – and the Macron hack appears to fit the bill, the official said.
Someone on 4chan – a site known, among other things, for cruel hoaxes and political extremism – posted links to a large set of data Friday night.
In a cursory look at the leaked documents, they appear to be day-to-day communications, with a few items so out of character that they might be fakes.
The Macron hacking announcement came just 10 days after the campaign’s digital chief, Mounir Mahjoubi, said it had been targeted by Russia-linked hackers – but that those hacking attempts had all been thwarted.
The documents leaked Friday were widely circulated on U.S. far-right sites. Experts dissecting the data say they spotted a couple of Russian names in the dump. Matt Suiche of cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies said “there’s Cyrillic script in the metadata,” but added it was hard to tell whether that’s due to carelessness or a deliberate misdirection.
Macron will vote Sunday in the seaside town of Le Touquet, where his wife Brigitte went for a walk Saturday with her daughter and grandchildren.