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Saturday, May 6, 2017

Emmanuel Macron's New Campaign Trail


Click to enlarge. Image Source: 4chan via Twitter.

Hackers have opened the e-mail account or accounts of the favoured French electoral candidate, Emmanuel Macron, and dumped 9 gigabytes of the contents online, current up to 24 April 2017. BBC:
"The campaign said that genuine files were mixed up with fake ones in order to confuse people. ...

About nine gigabytes of data were posted online by an anonymous user.

The details are unclear so far, but Mr Macron's En Marche movement said internal campaign documents, including emails and financial data, had been taken in an 'act of massive, co-ordinated hacking'.

'The leaked files were obtained several weeks ago by hacking personal and professional email accounts of several officials of the movement,' it said in a statement.

The campaign said the documents showed only legitimate campaign activities.

France's election authorities have warned media outlets against reporting on the contents of the leaked documents because of the restrictions now in place. ...

That too remains unclear. The Macron camp has not blamed any specific party but said the hack clearly aimed to damage it and undermine French democracy[.]

It compared it to the leak of Democratic Party emails in last year's US presidential election that was blamed on Russian hackers.

Wikileaks, which published those emails, posted a link to the Macron documents on Twitter but implied it was not responsible."
The NYT, which is firmly anti-Le Pen, reported that Le Pen's campaign also faced regular (unsuccessful) hacks during the campaign. Some people on Twitter think the hack is Russian; some think the hackers were American. Some think the hack is fake. Liberals think it is anti-democratic and Russian or neo-Nazi-sourced.

The alt-right are rejoicing - or some of them are. The more sober ones are considering all the French laws that have been broken by a random dump which has revealed sensitive national information; they are speculating when 4chan will be shut down and - who among them will be arrested. If these tweets among the alt-right are correct, then this 4chan hack was US-sourced from the alt-right. But this is unsubstantiated Twitter gossip, which may in itself be disinformation. It is certain that 4chan and its users will be investigated.









My next post will begin to consider how meme campaigns work, and I will touch in that regard on the work of Mike Cernovich, mentioned in the above tweet. For now, see below: the hack is now the foundation for an American alt-right meme war meant to sway the French election in Marine Le Pen's favour.


Memes notwithstanding, others think there is nothing to see in the documents. WikiLeaks assessed the hack when it appeared on 4chan (here) and Assange claims it is genuine. This is the original leak, archived here, and re-circulated:
"Are you ready /pol/?



In this pastebin are links to torrents of emails between Macron, his team and other officials, politicians as well as original documents and photos

This was passed on to me today so now I am giving it to you, the people. The leak is massive and released in the hopes that the human search engine here will be able to start sifting through the contents and figure out exactly what we have here.

inb4 fake news this was verified by people at THOTCON"
The official and MSM response was that journalists should not report on this information, since it could influence the 7 May 2017 election and the source of the hack is unknown. The leak is being discussed on Twitter here. Below is a selection of tweets from the general conversation. In line with the speculation above about an American hacking source, the comments are almost all in English, which is perhaps the most telling detail.










The hack includes banking and other financial information. Image Source: 4chan via Engineering Evil.

The Gemplus main folder in the Macron hack. Click to enlarge. Image Source: 4chan and Twitter and here. See also the whole folder here.

There is a Saudi Arabia file in the dump. Click to enlarge. Image Source: 4chan via Twitter.





ADDENDUM (1 June 2017):


ADDENDUM (31 July 2017):




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