Report: DNC Hackers Targeted French Candidate, Too

Phishing scheme was unsuccessful, officials say
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 25, 2017 11:07 AM CDT
Report: DNC Hackers Targeted French Candidate, Too
French centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday.   (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Hillary Clinton says she lost the 2016 election due in part to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, looks poised to become France's next president despite a seemingly similar effort to derail his campaign. According to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, Macron—who will compete against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the May 7 election—appears to have been targeted by the same Russian hackers who took aim at Clinton's campaign, though officials say they didn’t manage to steal staffers’ email passwords, per the New York Times. The scheme involved emails sent to campaign officials with links to web addresses almost identical to those of Macron's party, CNN reports.

Trend Micro—which also claims the hackers targeted groups linked to political parties in Germany, per the Hill—says it traced those addresses to Fancy Bear, the same group US intelligence has blamed for the DNC hack. The Macron campaign had previously suggested Russia might be behind a "highly sophisticated" effort to access campaign emails using shady web pages that were "pixel perfect" matches to originals, with only tiny differences in URLs. In response to the report, however, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin says Russia has "never interfered" in foreign elections and the latest charges are "a reminder of the accusations that were heard from Washington just recently and that have remained unconfirmed to this day." (More Emmanuel Macron stories.)

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