France election: Macron campaign target of ‘massive’ hack

HACKED documents of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign have been leaked online after the frontrunner complained of Russian interference.

French presidential election candidate for the En Marche! movement Emmanuel Macron (left) and French presidential election candidate for the far-right Front National (FN) party Marine Le Pen.

FRENCH presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign says it has been the target of a “massive” computer hack that dumped its campaign emails online just days before voters go to the polls.

Some nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for posting the data or if any of them were genuine, but fears of Russian meddling has clouded the French campaign.

In a statement, Macron’s political movement En Marche! (Onwards!) confirmed that it had been hacked.

“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,” the statement said.

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French presidential election candidate for the En Marche! movement Emmanuel Macron.

An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing French rules which forbid any commentary liable to influence an election, and which took effect at midnight French time on Friday.

Comments about the email dump began to appear on Friday evening just hours before the official ban on campaigning began. The ban is due to stay in place until the last polling stations close on Sunday at 8pm (France time).

Opinion polls show independent centrist Macron is set to beat National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s second round of voting, in what is seen to be France’s most important election in decades. The latest surveys show him winning with about 62 per cent of the vote.

The former economy minister’s team has complained in the past about attempts to hack its emails 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 the perpetrators had so far failed to compromise any campaign data.

French presidential election candidate for the far-right Front National party Marine Le Pen greets Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow earlier this year. Picture: Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev.

In February, the Kremlin denied that it was behind any such attacks, even though Macron’s camp renewed complaints against Russian media and a hackers’ group operating in Ukraine.

In its statement on Friday, En Marche! said that the documents released online showed only the normal functionings of a presidential campaign, but that authentic documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow “doubt and misinformation”.

“The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy be put at risk,” it added.

The French presidential election campaign is not the first to be overshadowed by accusations of manipulation via computer hacking and cyber-attacks.

US intelligence agencies said in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic campaign to influence the election on behalf of Donald Trump, her Republican rival who went on to win the US presidency.