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Security Politics

Days Before Election: Macron Campaign Says It Is the Victim of Massive, Coordinated Hacking Campaign (cnbc.com) 233

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A large trove of emails from the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was posted online late on Friday, a little more than a day before voters go to the polls to choose the country's next president in a run-off against far-right rival Marine Le Pen. 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 whether the emails were genuine. 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. In its statement on Friday, En Marche! said that the documents released online only showed the normal functioning 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.
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Days Before Election: Macron Campaign Says It Is the Victim of Massive, Coordinated Hacking Campaign

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  • Putin at it again? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @06:49PM (#54364711) Journal
    So far as I can see, it's no big secret that Putin would like to destabilize the EU, especially NATO countries, because a weak EU/NATO means it's easier for him to implement his long-term agenda.
    • by parallel_prankster ( 1455313 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @06:53PM (#54364725)

      They funny thing is Le Penn has also filed a complaint about hacking by the "extreme left"! So whether that is supposed to attack the credibility of Macron's accusations or add to them, we dont know.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:21PM (#54364871)

        They funny thing is Le Penn has also filed a complaint about hacking by the "extreme left"! So whether that is supposed to attack the credibility of Macron's accusations or add to them, we dont know.

        The thing is, the extreme left... or the left in general don't have a candidate in this election. Marcon is centre right (he's a banker), Le Pen is extreme right.

        France is centre right leaning in general though, so I expect this to be a victory for Marcon, sadly not enough of a victory to put Front National out of its misery.

        I wouldn't trust anything coming out of Le Pen to be accurate or grounded in reality. She's basically following Trumps strategy of attacking her opponent instead of announcing policy but in a far less competent manner (yes, I didn't think it was possible either).

        • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:49PM (#54365037)

          "She's basically following Trumps strategy of attacking her opponent..."

          Thereby becoming the first political candidate in history to do so.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Politicians that try to emulate Trump tend to fail because they can't bring themselves to go all in. They just can't let go and say that stupid shit that puts them firmly in the post-truth realm. Can't bring themselves to mock the disabled or the other candidates' spouses, proving they will say anything with no filtration.

          Basically they can't let go of their dignity and throw themselves 100% into the role. Trump can only do it because it's not a role for him, it's just him.

      • Kind of like how the North Koreans have announced their discovery of a plot to assassinate Kim using a biochemical weapon, you mean?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      As far as I can see, telling the bloody truth about what is going on in political party caimpagns, should be compulsary under law and attempting to keep it secret should be considered a criminal act punishable by an extended custodial sentence.

      Those fuckers have no problem prying into our lives after they are elected and we have every single fucking right to pry into the tiniest detail of their election campaign and that should be mandated by law.

      What an absurd notion, people running for election for publ

    • Is this like when Trend Micro said that Russia was hacking the French election and oh by the way they "had no proof of a Russian role".

      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]

      • yea i remember the "security" companies saying that the russians definitely hacked the election, and then about 2 lines from the end of the article it says they found no proof/items they could trace or track in the hacks. i wish i could remember what company that was. it was ran here on slashdot if you guys want to find it. but anybody that actually read it could tell it was an assumption by people that hated trump and wanted hillary to win(most of the tech industry from what i see lol).

  • Now who could possibly want to damage Macron, other than the Le Pen campaign?

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      Now who could possibly want to damage Macron, other than the Le Pen campaign?

      His MILF's relatives?

    • Anyone that has a beef with Macron which after the revelations of offshore accounts to accept bribes and evade taxes should be: every French voter benefits.

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      This election is a strange one.
      First turn, there were 4 major parties sharing about a quarter of the votes each, plus outsiders. This is unusual. Normally there are two major parties, like in many countries. Out of two traditional parties, the right wing candidate arrived 3rd and didn't pass and the left wing candidate ended up as one of the outsiders.
      The result is that we now have two candidates that most of the population doesn't want. Meaning that many people will vote Macron to prevent Le Pen from passi

  • by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:00PM (#54364757) Homepage Journal

    "The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy be put at risk"

    How is Democracy at risk over this? Does not "information want to be free"? Is not it good that voters know more about the candidate, than less?

    Suppose, somebody hacked Trump's tax-returns — would that also be denounced as a threat to Democracy, or cheered?

    • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:14PM (#54364829)

      How is Democracy at risk over this? Does not "information want to be free"? Is not it good that voters know more about the candidate, than less?

      It's good if the information is accurate. The problem here is that misinformation has been mixed in with the information. When people are misinformed, they make poor choices.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        How is Democracy at risk over this? Does not "information want to be free"? Is not it good that voters know more about the candidate, than less?

        It's good if the information is accurate. The problem here is that misinformation has been mixed in with the information. When people are misinformed, they make poor choices.

        And me without mod points.

        The problem with recent elections is not the availability of information, but the availability of misinformation. Often the quality of accurate information is so bad, the less well informed cant tell the difference between information and misinformation. The result is, as you said, poor choices.

        • The problem with recent elections is not the availability of information, but the availability of misinformation.

          How is this problem unique to the recent elections? Mark Twain wrote his Running for Governor [loa.org] in the 1870 — you really ought to read it to get rid of these silly beliefs, that our contemporary politicians are somehow uniquely bad and good.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        That's not the only problem. When you hack only one candidate's campaign but not the other, and then search through reems of data in the one hacked candidate to pick out the "juicy bits" (particularly if you slowly drip them out in out in order to dominate the news cycle every day, but even if you just dump them all at once), you're going to inherently bias the results. Because among the hundreds of thousands of emails generated by a campaign, there's always going to be some "gotchas!" (you could dig throug

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Quite easy: by controlling what is leaked and when.

      What: make sure to only leak truths that hurt a certain candidate more than the other, preferably the one that you support.
      When: make sure to do so a few days before general election, especially if the polls are showing the candidate that you don't support to have a considerable advantage.

      What you're talking about is utopia: if people had access to all information at all times, yes, in that case I'd agree with you. But that's not what we have here, here we

      • And how many damning stories haven't you read about LePen? If one camp plays the holier than thou card for weeks on end they should make sure that their picks are outstanding citizens that have no dirt whatsoever. It seems to me they tried hard with Trump, releasing 20 year old footage 'strategically' even going as far as using NSA collected data and they couldn't find anything but what we already knew, that he's a ruthless, abrasive business person. We peek at a single mailbox of associates of these 'bette

  • #3: You gonna get hacked!

    Why do I assume it was a Windows machine that was compromised? Because it's always* a Windows machine that gets compromised.

    * excludes all instances of morons running internet-facing PHP sites *cough*wordpress*cough*

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Windows hasn't been the most popular target for years. Applications have. Browsers have. Flash, Acrobat, SQL, SSL, *PEOPLE* have. Actually the biggest risk to any of your data is you yourself you incompetent phishable person susceptible to social attacks.

      Out of all the major breaches in the past few years, few of them had anything to do with Windows. I personally think we should get rid of users. Users are a huge security risk. Maybe we should change all their passwords on them for their own protection.

  • by DonaId Trump ( 4811527 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:09PM (#54364805)

    Julian, if you're listening, the check is in the mail. It's a bigly check, believe me. You're a great guy, many people are saying you're the greatest person to witness the Civil War. We're going to make the best prison pen pals, believe me.

  • This is not likely to have an impact, IMO, as majority of french voters are already convinced that both candidates are highly toxic.

    Many will vote Macron while they hate him, because they consider Le Pen to be more dangerous. Hence a smear campaign against Macron is unlikely to change their votes.

    • Re:No impact (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Friday May 05, 2017 @07:38PM (#54364971) Journal

      Macron is still the favorite, so yes, this may come too late to influence the election, but in the longer term I think Western nations are going to have get used to, and find ways to deal with this tactic. This new form of propaganda cyberwarfare has allowed Russia to punch considerably above its weight, and time and time again we're seeing the goal here is to disrupt the Western alliance. It's certainly not a guaranteed win, as it now seems that Russia's alleged interference in the US election is likely backfiring, and forcing Trump to take a harder line, not to mention that despite Fox News and the Republicans best attempts to bury the news, the investigation into Russian ties to Trump's campaign are ongoing.

    • This is not likely to have an impact, IMO, as majority of french voters are already convinced that both candidates are highly toxic.

      Many will vote Macron while they hate him, because they consider Le Pen to be more dangerous. Hence a smear campaign against Macron is unlikely to change their votes.

      The same was the case in the US, but there the last minute FUD worked. Though Macrons lead is not in single digits, so I doubt the Russians and deep state fascists can duplicate the feat.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. It is a choice between "bad" and "far, far worse". Democracy is f***** a the ones that essentially did it are the utterly demented voters that understand nothing. Same everywhere, to different degrees (for now).

      • The problem is that the worst is different depending of who you speak to. For instance, Emmanuel Macron is the worst for many working poors that have already being victims of his laws during Francois Hollande presidency. For slightly wealthier people, Marine Le Pen is the worst because she is a fascist.

        You are a bit quick at pointing fingers to voters. The french presidential election is very badly designed. Here the two finalists gathered 45% of votes, and if you count citizen that did not vote, it falls t

  • Why is there a strange feeling of deja vu? Anybody else have a feeling this is a scene out of The Matrix and you see a black cat cross your path yet again?

  • More info at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
    Of course the culpable stuff will be 'fake'.
    But I say: where there's smoke, there's fire.
    Macron is a Rothschild puppet.
  • - Target Progressives
    - Leak at last minute to prevent effective rebuttal
    - Seed with fake items in mass of mundane rubbish

    There should be no doubt that Assanger is FSB asset.

    Assanger recently meet the Farrage.

    Expect a similar fake leak just before the upcoming UK General Election.

  • This need to be exposed for what it is, 21st Century Propaganda from from Russia. The pattern is the same every time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • ...since they were in French...

  • Obviously the work of the Russians, based on... well, I said so. And the US hack had all the markings of a Russian hack, which we know all about in detail, and I'm sure every other major govt does as well, but nobody could have left that trail themselves.

    And we know about the major hacking operation of sending a phishing email to John Podesta asking him to enter his password into a form on a random website, and Russian mind rays made him actually do it.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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