Hacked emails of French Presidential Candidate Macron leaked – and could be fake

Just 48 hours before the Presidential Elections in France, over 9 GB of allege archive of emails of Emmanuel Macron, a candidate, leaked online thanks to an external hacking attack. The attack was based on a phishing domain created by the attackers to impersonate the site that Macron’s campaign associates used for cloud data storage. Such an attempt was reported by the security firm Trend Micro back in March, and attributed to the Russian hacker group Fancy Bear, yet Macron’s campaign then claimed the attack failed. According to Wired, cybersecurity experts have confirmed that the structure of the email archive seems real, yet warned that this doesn’t mean that the content is genuine but some of it could be forged designed to spark scandal. The Daily Beast, however, reported that Macron’s team had prepared a strategy against possible hacking and has purposely accessed the phishing pages to implant false information through multiple true and false log-ins, in order to force the attackers and the leaking websites like Wikileaks to need to spend time to figure out what is false and what is true. Ultimately, it may have discredited the entire leak, which could be one of the reasons why newspapers and broadcasters in France avoided to report on details of the leak, The New York Times reports.