Chesnot/Getty Images(PARIS) — Ahead of Sunday’s second round vote, the campaign of leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has confirmed it was the target of a “massive hacking attack.”
The campaign said Friday according to BBC that genuine and fake emails were among about 9 gigabytes of data posted anonymously online before the end of the official presidential campaigning period when there would be a blackout on media coverage ahead of the vote.
In a statement, France’s election campaign commission (CNCCEP) said it was notified by a representative from the centrist candidate’s campaign of an IT attack. The commission recommended to media to not report on the contents of the data, because some of it was “probably false” and “the dissemination of false information is liable to fall within the scope of the law, in particular criminal law.”
A security research firm told ABC News last month that Macron was targeted in cyberattacks by the group behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“The attacks could have started [in the middle of] March and I think they went on for half of April,” Feike Hacqueboard, a senior threat researcher with security firm Trend Micro, told ABC News in a phone call from the Netherlands.
Macron is leading by at least 20 points in polls against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
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