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

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.

Comments

Re:How is "Democracy at risk"?

[Rei]

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 through anyone's email history and find things to attack them with, let alone an entire national campaign generating a huge amount of email traffic). If you only release them for one side, you're highly skewing the contest. And you're doing so via committing a crime. And it's all the worse if it's a foreign power, doing so, via a crime, in order to achieve their geopolitical objectives (but it's still bad even if it's domestic).