U.S. Far-Right Activists Promote Hacking Attack Against Macron
“Intervening in the final hour of the official campaign, this operation is clearly a matter of democratic destabilization, as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” Mr. Macron’s campaign said in a statement late Friday, minutes before the communications prohibition went into effect.
.. By Saturday, a trail of digital crumbs appeared to tie the attack on Mr. Macron’s campaign to Russian hackers. Forensics specialists found that one of the leaked Excel documents from Mr. Macron’s campaign had been modified on a Russian version of Excel, and edited on Russian-language computers.
One document had last been modified by a Russian user named Roshka Georgiy Petrovich. Mr. Petrovich, 32, an employee of the Moscow-based Eureka CJSC, a Russian technology company, did not immediately return emails requesting comment. Eureka CJSC’s clients include several Russian government agencies
.. A week before the second round of the French election, for instance, online activists, many from the United States and other English-speaking countries, flooded Twitter with coordinated anti-Macron memes — online satirical photos with often biting captions — carrying hashtags like #elysee2017 that were linked to the campaign. That included portraying him as a 21st-century equivalent of Marie Antoinette, the out-of-touch last queen of France, and other memes made allegations of an extramarital affair.
“They tried to bombard French Twitter with memes favorable to Le Pen,”
.. posted what were said to be copies of documents showing that Mr. Macron had supposedly set up a bank account in the Bahamas to avoid paying taxes. He denied the allegations.
Ms. Le Pen referred to such an overseas bank account during the vicious debate, leading to a bitter rebuttal by Mr. Macron’s team and an official investigation into the spread of the rumors.
.. Yet in a sign of how the far right outside the country is trying to foment the discussion, many of the Twitter posts about the hacking have originated in the United States, according to Trendsmap, a data analytics tool. About half of the social media messages around political hashtags linked to the breach have been written in English
.. “Misinformation is increasingly used to achieve political ends,” Mr. Sarts said. “Technology helps to amplify that message through fake news sites and social media.”