Intelligence material released by two US Congressmen reveals that Russia spied on French president with over 2 dozen Facebook accounts early this year. Sources which gave the briefing said that the objective behind this espionage was to spy on President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign and sink his political career.
As per the report briefed by the two congressmen who like to be anonymous, Russia wanted Nationalist Marine Le Pen to emerge as the winner in the French elections held in May this year.
For this reason, they wanted to spy on Macron’s staff via web services. It is said that Facebook acted as one of spying resources to conduct surveillance and so the agents hailing from Russian Intelligence indulged in the activity from November’16 to March’17.
Nevertheless, Macron’s staff sniffed the activity in time and somehow averted the risk of being cyber attacked further. They also informed Facebook about the activity at the end of March 2017 to which the social media giant immediately reacted by banning those accounts.
Later, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed to Reuters that over 70k Facebook user accounts were used by hackers in promoting fake propagandas or spam during the French Elections’ 2017.
On June’17 Russian President Vladimir Putin denied media allegations which said that Russian Federation tried its best to interfere in the French Election. At the same time, the president notified the world that the espionage could have been conducted by some patriotic hackers of the country who are no way connected to the government.
Smart thinking….isn’t it!
