Anyone who has kept his or her eye on the French presidential race has probably been entertained a time or two. The face-off between the leftist Emmanuel Macron and the populist Marine Le Pen has been one of the most prominent since the US election last year. Earlier this week the two candidates had tried their hand at a presidential debate that left Macron in the lead with the opinion polls giving him an easy lead over his right-wing counterpart with 60-40 odds. Now, with just one day to go before the voters pick their leader on Sunday, both parties have come up outraged. Why? They have been hacked.
On Friday, En Marche, the campaign team that has been running the show for Macron, confirmed that 9 gigabyte worth of campaign correspondence had been retrieved from their servers. The data, consisting of photographs and emails from the leading candidate’s campaign team, was allegedly retrieved by a group of Moscow-associated hackers known as Pawn Storm. The group’s members are not known. En Marche alleged however that the group’s digital signature- spearphishing- was recognizable thereby linking them to the cyber attack.
According to En Marche, the information stolen from the servers was then posted to a document sharing website known as the Pastebin. Pastebin allows members to post any data they have incognito. This precaution has made it difficult for the hackers to be traced. The documents made it further when pages such as the Wiki page took it up and offered links from which the data could be viewed.
Though En Marche acknowledged that most of the documents that had been shared on the site were original, it denied the knowledge of others completely. The rough translation to the group’s stand was that ‘the real documents had been intertwined with fake documents to validate the authenticity of the invalid ones.’
The release of these documents came two days before France was to choose its new leader. With Macron’s lead on Le Pen, many Macron supporters vaguely cast suspicion on his Presidential opponent. Le Pen’s supporters, however, defended her by stating that they too had almost been hacked. The piece was carried by the New York Times, which delineated that Le Pen and her group’s website had experienced ‘a few trial-and-error breaches’ on the party’s website. The insinuation that the two sides had been affected by cyber attacks left the Macron party to look for somebody else to point the finger at, the most obvious being Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had visited the European nation before, subtly endorsing the more populist-inclined Le Pen. Russia had been suspected of trying to tamper with US elections before so it was not a big leap that he may have tried doing the same in France as well. Putin dismissed the claim when he came to France the first time, but the recent attack and its ties to the Soviet nation have cast doubts as to whether he was telling the truth.
French Interior Ministry officials declined to comment on their suspicions, citing that it would be unconstitutional to give any statement that would influence French voters in Sunday’s election.
