French presidential election:Russia blamed as Macron campaign blasts ”massive hacking attack”
The campaign team of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron said on Friday night it had been the victim of a "massive hacking attack" after a trove of documents was released online. The apparent hack came on the final day of campaigning in the French presidential election, with Mr Macron, the centrist, facing Marine Le Pen, […]
The campaign team of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron said on Friday night it had been the victim of a "massive hacking attack" after a trove of documents was released online.
The apparent hack came on the final day of campaigning in the French presidential election, with Mr Macron, the centrist, facing Marine Le Pen, the far-Right candidate in tomorrow’s run-off.
Immediate suspicion fell on Russia, which has been accused of meddling in the US election to help get Donald Trump elected in November.
Campaign officials stated 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 Mr Macron.
"The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information," Mr 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 late on Friday.
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.
The Macron campaign statement added that all the documents were "lawful".
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.