Russian hackers 'targeted Macron campaign'

Researchers with the Japanese anti-virus firm Trend Micro say the campaign of French presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by Russia-linked hackers, adding more details to previous suggestions that the centrist politician was being singled out for electronic eavesdropping by the Kremlin.

Trend Micro said the hacking group behind the phishing attempts was "Pawn Storm", its name for a group tracked for years by the security researchers.

According to the research firm, the hackers created several email addresses on a fake server with the URL onedrive-en-marche.fr, operating from computers with IP addresses in multiple European nations including Britain. Macron's party is En Marche!

The campaign's digital chief, Mounir Mahjoubi, confirmed the attempted intrusions in a telephone interview late Monday but said they had all been thwarted.

"These are usual cyberattack tactics".

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"No sensitive data ever leaked from our apparatus", Mahjoubi said, adding that he had no proof of a Russian role in it.

A French official told CNN that French intelligence services are warning campaigns to take steps to prevent being targeted by hackers.

Macron, a former French economic minister, won 24 percent of the vote in France's first round of presidential elections on Sunday.

"What we can establish is that it's the classic operation procedure of Pawn Storm", the spokesman said.

Russian government officials have long denied claims of state-sanctioned hacking.

Hacking culprits can be hard to track back and identify with certainty.

Mahijoubi also said he could not prove that the hackers were linked to Russian Federation. Hacquebord said the Russian hackers had set up or activated domains this month to launch attacks on two prominent think tanks, Konrad Adenauer and Friedrich Ebert, foundations linked, respectively, with the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties.

"Russian intelligence have certainly been hacking inside France, and will continue to do so", said Columbia University's Jason Healey.

Russian Federation has denied that it is behind attacks aimed at Mr Macron.

The French presidential election has been hit with a case of déjà vu.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told Russian news outlets that the country was not interfering with the French election, or any foreign election, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"It resembles the accusations made by Washington which to this day remain hollow, and they do no honour to the people making them". Macron favors a strong European Union, while Le Pen wants to pull France out of the bloc, weakening it.

"Le Pen has been very open about her desire to have better relations with Russian Federation, she's an outspoken opponent of sanctions [against Russia], and she's interested in taking France outside of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation", said Will Pomeranz at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Former Asst. Sec. of State David J. Kramer, now with the McCain Institute in Washington, says the two also have a number of things in common: a focus on national sovereignty, a distrust for worldwide institutions, a keen focus on fighting Islamic terrorism, an embrace of traditional values and a vigorous style. "She has a very populist right-wing message that plays to Putin's narratives - it undermines Western institutions".