Macron campaign suffers data breach on eve of French runoff

(Image credit: Pascal Pavani/Getty Images)

published 6 May 2017

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron is the subject of a "massive and coordinated hacking operation," his campaign said Friday evening, an attack timed in advance of Sunday's runoff vote between Macron, the centrist frontrunner, and far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen.

Some 14.5 gigabytes of content in about 70,000 files — including emails, business documents, and more — were leaked via a text storage site called Pastebin. The Macron campaign says falsified files were mixed among the real ones "to create confusion and misinformation," comparing the attack to allegations of Russian attempts to manipulate the U.S. presidential election by leaking information from the Hillary Clinton campaign.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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