Emmanuel Macron, who is all set to win France’s Presidential election was recently cyber attacked by Russian spies. As per our sources, his presidential campaign was intercepted by a hacking group named ‘Pawn Storm’ linked to Russia’s Military Intelligence Agency GRU. The hackers group launched a phishing campaign between March & April this year and tried to install malware on the campaign website. The hackers used servers based in France, Britain, and India to launch the attacks.
Feike Hacquebord, a researcher at Trend Micro said that he has enough evidence to prove these claims and said that Macron’s campaign could have turned into a disaster if his security officials haven’t acted in time.
Mr. Feike added that Macron attacks were similar to the one launched on US Democratic National Committee and ‘then’ US Presidential Probable Hillary Clinton in early 2016.
Remember, Russian spies launched a similar cyber attack campaign on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party in April and May of 2016.
Security Experts from CrowdStrike feel that pawn storm has the tendency to let time pass before leaking stolen documents on web. And so, they predict that anything could happen to Macron’s campaign before the second round of May 7th, 2017.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson from ANSSI- the French government cyber security agency confirmed the attack on Macron’s campaign and added that some critical info might have leaked in this process.
Note 1- Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t want Macron, a liberal internationalist to win the France elections. This is due to the fact that Macron has been criticizing Russian foreign policy from many years. On the other hand, Marine Le Pen, who has taken a lot of loans from Russian banks and advocated pro-Kremlin policies, is a favorite to the Russian president.
Note- 2 Pawn Storm is known to be one of the world’s oldest cyber espionage groups and is also recognized with names such as Fancy Bear, APT28, Sofancy, and Strontium.
