Russian hackers believed to have targeted the favourite to win France’s presidential election
The campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the favourite to win France’s presidential election, has been targeted by a cyber espionage group linked by some experts to the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.
Feike Hacquebord, a researcher with security firm Trend Micro said he had found proof that the spy group, dubbed “Pawn Storm”, targeted the Macron campaign with email phishing traps and attempts to install malware on the campaign site.
He said telltale digital fingerprints connected the Macron attacks with those last year on the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) the campaign of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and that similar approaches were used to target German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party in April and May of 2016.
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“We have seen that phishing sites were set up and the fingerprints were really the same actors as in the DNC breach,” Hacquebord told Reuters.
Russia denied any involvement in the attacks on Macron’s campaign.
According to security experts, Pawn Storm is known to let time pass before leaking stolen documents and that any hacking of Macron’s campaign in recent months is unlikely to influence the run-up to the May 7 second round. But, if documents have been stolen, they could be used to sabotage Macron’s presidency should he win.
A spokesman for French government cyber security agency ANSSI confirmed the attacks on the Macron campaign, although he declined to comment whether the Russian-linked group was to blame.
“What we can establish is that it’s the classic operation procedure of Pawn Storm. However, we will not attribute the attack because we can very easily be manipulated and the attacker could pass themselves off as somebody else.” the spokesman said.
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