WikiLeaks releases thousands of hacked Macron campaign emails

PARIS - 1 August 2017: More than 20,000 emails from Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign have been published by WikiLeaks, The Telegraph reported on Monday.

The whistle-blowing website released the trove of leaked emails on Monday as a searchable archive. It comes almost three months after the Macron campaign was hacked on the eve of his election.

WikiLeaks, best known for publishing huge stores of US spy agency records, said the emails date between March 2009 and April 24 2017.

The organisation said it had confirmed the 21,075 emails were sent or received by addresses associated with the campaign by checking the “domain keys” used to sign emails. It published a further 50,773 emails it could not verify.

In total, the leak includes 71,848 emails, 26,506 attachments and details of 4,493 unique senders.

The Macron campaign announced that it had been hacked on May 5, just days before his run-off victory over Marine Le Pen.

The campaign has previously blamed Russian interests for the hacking and cybersecurity researchers have linked the attack to a group known as APT28 or Fancy Bears, the group believed to have hacked the US Democrats last year and which is often linked to the Kremlin.

Russia has denied responsibility and the head of France’s cybersecurity agency, Guillaume Poupard, has said there is no evidence of Russian interference. On Monday Wikileaks referenced Poupard’s comments when it published the emails.