Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack | Hacker News Reader

Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack

nytimes.com

53 pointsgerbilly90 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277346

Corrine Erhel, Macron's person for everything dealing with surveillance, digital control and the like, dies suddenly of a heart attack yesterday. She dies the same evening the Macron leaks are released. Coincidence?

Considering the parallels with the USA 2016 election, and the murder of Seth Rich - I don't think so.

Good ol' Confirmation Bias.

How does it apply here?

You are seeking to confirm that there is a targeted attack on Macron and his movement. En Marché has been hacked recently, Wikileaks published it. Now one of his campaign leaders, 50 year old woman who helped him with everything regarding privacy and surveillance, dies. Then concluding from this that it cannot be conincidence is what is known as confirmation bias. Seeking to confirm one's pre-formed hypothesis.

Thanks.

What parallels with Seth Rich? That they both passed away during an election?

Or allegedly killed by their bosses.

I allege that you were killed by your boss.

There. You all three share similarities. Conspiracy!

> the murder of Seth Rich

Seth Rich was killed by inner-city violence. Quoting our President: "Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store." "We'll get rid of the crime. You'll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot. Look at the statistics."

Given the fact that you can't walk around America's inner cities without getting shot, any more conspiratorial explanation for Seth Rich's death just doesn't seem necessary. Or was our esteemed president wrong about inner-city violence?

This is a verifiably false comment that I hope was written from ignorance and not something else.

Seth Rich was not killed by "inner-city violence." He was killed by an unknown assailant, presumably in a mugging but it is again unknown. It was also not in the inner city, but in the Bloomingdale neighborhood which is rather nice and you can read about it here [1].

>Given the fact that you can't walk around America's inner cities without getting shot

Again, this is far from what I'd call a "fact" and is rather ignorant. Plenty of people live and work in inner cities across America without ever being shot or shooting someone. Your bizarre appeal to authority with quoting Obama doesn't have any bearing in reality. Seth Rich's murder may have been, and likely was, a random act of violence. But that does not justify the assertions of your comment.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2016/08/12/heres-w...

I guess my sarcasm was too subtle. Yes, it appears that he was in fact killed in a mugging gone wrong. Yes, those things are pretty rare in the US (but not unknown).

> Your bizarre appeal to authority with quoting Obama

I was quoting Trump, not Obama (Obama is no longer our president). And in particular, the same people who are most inclined to believe that Mr. Rich was killed by government agents or DNC goons or something are also the people most inclined to believe Trump's (incorrect) claim that you can't walk down the street in the without getting shot. Why don't they take his assertion seriously in this case?

I believe he was quoting Trump, not Obama.

WikiLeaks has already identified several files in the leaks containing [Cyrillic tags in their metadata.][1]

[1]: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860855087165571073

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvj0v0W6yjk&feature=youtu.be...

At this point, I'm not sure that's indicative of anything. With all of this The Russians are coming! noise that's been spewed out over the past year, it strikes me as the first thing you'd do to deflect casual attention would be to plant some Cyrillic text in a place that looks suspicious.

It indicates very clearly that the leaker is editing Word documents before releasing them, since French Word users are not going to use Cyrillic.

And it shows the leaker is not uber-competent.

So, if an email from Macron looks too depraved to be real, it probably is.

Either way, whether planted deliberately or left there by accident, it shows that at least those files are definitely fake.

I agree with you the meta data could mean nothing.

But "noise"? More likely you're a paid troll.

I wish somebody was paying me...

From wikileaks:

French media warned not to publish https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860841351595921409

No fakes that we see https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860638153471918081

Timing curious https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860603123236315137

WikiLeaks is not neutral

Perhaps less controversially, the whole non-editorial editorial policy is super-vulnerable to manipulation. The source can stick anything they want into the stream since WikiLeaks' stated editorial policy is "that's not our job." Garbage in, garbage out.

If you've got bullshit that you want to look real, stick it in the middle of real shit and get WikiLeaks to leak it. Proof!

[minor edit for grammar]

Can you point to this happening in any of their recent leaks? The DNC didn't dispute any of the emails, so which did you have in mind?

The parent comment is cherrypicking tweets from WikiLeaks. Take a look at [their actual feed][1]. They have since [discounted several conspiracy theories against Macron][2] and [brought into question the legitimacy of some of the files][3].

[1]: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/with_replies

[2]: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860846823229059072

[3]: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860855087165571073

WikiLeaks also a 100% track record of being correct. Biases accounted for, they are accurate.

They routinely make claims not supported by the evidence they have. They retweeted the pizza child trafficking garbage, made up facts about redirecting responsibility for attacks.

This, exactly. They defend their claims by saying, "we're just asking the questions." There are tons (thousands, I would argue) of innocent victims who are put in the crosshairs because of WikiLeaks' agenda.

> They retweeted the pizza child trafficking garbage,

Please, dear god, tell me you're kidding and no sane person is taking that theory seriously.

>Please, dear god, tell me you're kidding and no sane person is taking that theory seriously.

I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you...

Do you have a source for that? My friend's company was the target of a huge smear campaign orchestrated by WikiLeaks, purely because they shared an address with a different company and had the word "Data" in their name.

The only people I know who would think WikiLeaks is infallible and an asset to society are frequenters of The_Donald and the conspiracy subreddits.

Or supporters of Al-Gore

There is absolutely no way someone can be familiar with the last couple years of Wikileaks and say that. Wikileaks has been flagrantly incorrect. The only way to say something like this is to badly want it to be true.

A good starting search here would be "Wikileaks Turkey".

In years past I would agree with you, then they started pushing pizzagate. Wikileaks is venturing into Alex Jones territory.

WikiLeaks may have a 100% track record of releasing accurate leaks, but they definitely have a poor track record of representing the leaked information accurately, and they know that the media reports on their analysis and not the raw leaks.

See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/the-truth-about-t...

We’ve seen WikiLeaks do this before. Last July, right after the attempted coup in Turkey, WikiLeaks promised, with much fanfare, to release emails belonging to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. What WikiLeaks ultimately released, however, was nothing but mundane mailing lists of tens of thousands of ordinary people who discussed politics online. Back then, too, the ruse worked: Many Western journalists had hyped these non-leaks.

No one and nothing has a track record of being 100% correct except Kim Jong Un if you're North Korean.

But they are neutral! It's like running into an Elemental Ice Golem. It's not good or evil, it's not left or right. It is just made of ice. WikiLeaks is an Elemental Truth & Leaks Golem. It doesn't give a shit whose agenda it helps, it just wants to expose more.

I would rather have a WikiLeaks that release everything that it can receives, rather than one that curates it's leaks for an agenda.

You honestly believe that? There's a pattern in the past year of Wikileaks only exposing one side.

Funny how people seem to care more about who was targeted or how they got the leaks, rather than the content of the leaks themselves.

You'd think evidence of corruption would be relevant and worthy of mass coverage, no matter who committed it or how it was obtained.

I have no doubt that Clinton was corrupt, but I think Trump is outright dangerous and a huge step backwards for the US. I'll take Clinton's status quo corruption, thank you very much.

Besides, your entire point rests upon the incorrect assumption that the other side isn't corrupt.

>your entire point rests upon the incorrect assumption that the other side isn't corrupt.

no it doesn't. Anyone's corruption should be exposed for the betterment of society.

Rather, it is your argument that solely depends on the belief that others ("the other side") MUST be guilty. I understand emotions run high to match the stakes since it was the presidential election after all, but you'll note I didn't make any value judgments either way. Just because we are convinced one party is guilty doesn't mean we should ignore evidence of another's corruption out of fairness.

>>You'd think evidence of corruption would be relevant and worthy of mass coverage, no matter who committed it or how it was obtained.

Our justice system cares a lot about how evidence used in a trial was obtained. If it was obtained illegally, it is often thrown out.

There is a good reason for this. I'm sure you can figure it out if you think about it. Here is a good start for some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule

Thanks for the condescension, but really we weren't talking about the justice system.

[WikiLeaks has stated repeatedly that they publish everything they receive.][1] Blaming them for failing to release information from the other side assumes that they have that information to release.

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2017/04/19/intercepted-podcast-juli...

Everything? "We do have some information about the republican campaign". http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/29345...

Parent said they publish everything they receive. They didn't receive Republican emails.

And, if some bad actor, say the Russians, are giving them all their info, and they are publishing "everything they receive", does that make them neutral? Or a willing pawn?

If they withheld the information that they received in the interest of neutrality, would that be better?

and Fox News says they're "fair and balanced."

Infowars says they are, "just asking the questions."

Breitbart says they are, "the last bastion of free speech."

None of the above 3 statements are true, and neither is Wikileaks statement.

Yes, and usually when I run into an elemental ice golem in a dungeon, it's because the bad guy has put it there as a trap for the good guys and walked away.

There is a sense in which you can call Wikileaks neutral, sure. But that doesn't mean that they actively ensure that they are politically neutral. Quite the opposite! They are uncaring. If one side feeds Wikileaks and not the other, Wikileaks will be 100% neutral in not shifting that balance. If anti-globalist forces consistently hack globalists and not vice versa and give that info to Wikileaks, sure, Wikileaks is going to say "We just want to expose more," but the set of information being exposed is extremely non-neutral!

I would rather not have an elemental ice golem at all, I think. And if I'm going to have an elemental ice golem, I would definitely prefer one that only attacks the bad guys than one that attacks "everyone" who happens to be in the secret entrance to the bad guys' lair.

"assessment update: several Office files have Cyrillic meta data." https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/860855087165571073

WikiLeaks is not journalism.

The downvote brigade is out in full force here again.

The upvote/downvote forum experiment doesn't work for political topics (which everything has an element of), it just results in censorship of non-status quo opinions.

It's scary to think that a teenager at home could setup something more resilient to attack than many of these important systems.

Like wow.

What is so surprising about that? Societies operate largely on trust. Once you throw that out of the window you can do all kinds of things but you will mostly likely end up being found out and ostracized or jailed.

Just like any idiot with a kitchen knife can walk into a shopping mall and kill people hacking email accounts and servers is quite doable. The only reason it keeps on happening is because it is hard to catch the perpetrators.

Sorry, your point may be valid but I don't see how it relates to my comment.

The point is that any teenager can likely get into your house, burglarize you or murder you.

You could go and live in a vault, but that would take the fun out of living and so as a society we have dealt with this by making this illegal and the chances of getting caught are large enough that people tend to not do those things.

But if the chances of getting caught were near zero you might have to go and live in a vault.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about how teenagers can build systems resilient against these attacks, not that they carry out the attacks themselves. (Although I conjecture that a significant proportion of these attacks are also carried out by teenagers.)

It goes both ways doesn't it? Whether teenagers can set up a system more resilient than your average systems administrator is something that I doubt anyway. Most teenagers could not hack their way out of a wet paper bag, but then there are some that totally blow your mind. Just like with older folks. Age does not have much to do with it.

If you are the target of a foreign intelligence service, you are going to be hacked, end of story. There is very little you can do to protect yourself from a threat like that over time.

Sure, but if I'm a major candidate in a national election, perhaps I should be protected by my domestic intelligence service. This is what I don't understand: why aren't we playing defense? Why isn't it a huge embarrassment to the Secret Service (in the US) or another defense agency when a campaign under their protection is successfully attacked like this? I would love to see the Russia investigations in the US Congress add a focus on bolstering defenses, rather than just doling out blame. The same should go for France and elsewhere. Cyber-defense is an arms race, but it's a battle that can and should be fought. Surely this is something all parties can agree on!

If you look into most high-profile hacks, you see that their opsec and security practices were weak.

You don't see Amazon or Stripe being hacked all the time, and they are certainly large enough targets.

Something setup at home would likely have a much smaller attack surface. Apples and oranges.

I didn't mean to imply that the system itself would be setup at home.

My point is that loads of kids have the knowledge and common sense to create something that would be more secure against attacks than many professional, corporate or political systems.

This is the new normal, also I'm glad this is happening. Here's why: perhaps this is what it takes to get politicians to take security seriously. Once enough elections have been won/lost because of security breaches in consumer products and commercial networks surely we should start to see consumer protection agencies given charter to protect consumers and bring suits against companies for mishandling breaches or gross negligence.

I'm not a security expert so this is a serious question.

Do you think there's a way to take security seriously enough to successfully defend against state-sponsored hacking? Is it simply inevitable that this sort of hacking leak will happen, or is this leak likely the result of some low-hanging fruit security tips being ignored?

I have no idea. My guess would be no. It sure would be nice if we were trying harder though.

The problem is the politician's kneejerk response is to reduce security by introducing backdoors. (See the legislation they actually try to pass)

They don't do what you suggest they should.

It's well-timed, if the goal is to have Macron stagger into office as seriously damaged goods.

This is correct. The goal is not to elect La Penne.

Yeah, and Trump's victory surprised everyone, including Russia and Trump. Electing Le Pen may not be the goal, but it could happen (I'm not familar with French elections).

There would have to be a seriously large polling error. Much bigger than the Trump margin. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/le-pen-is-just-a-gargan...

I think probably the Russians, since not many Western countries trust them anyway and so not much to lose, lots to gain.

Or it could have been the US (I'm American). The US administration likes LePen and nationalism.

"According to the study, the U.S. intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

And if that doesn't work, sometimes we just overthrow countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Le Pen is openly supported by Russia, just like most right-wing parties in the EU. And it's been like this for years.

I wonder if anyone had time to dig in?

It seems to have conflicted reports on the Internet about how important it is and if some documents were in fact faked as alleged by the Macron campaign at least in the first time. The french media blackout to follow election rules doesn't seem to help.

What people may not realize is that we have a complete renewal of the parliament in less than two month, and if macron doesn't have a majority, then his prime minister may very well end up being a political opponent.

Rigging or trying to influence french elections would mean rigging four votes over the course of two months ( not even counting primaries inside political parties, each with two turns), which seems a bit unlikely to happen. I'd say our system is pretty secure in that matter.

>yes we said it

>but we didn't want you to know we said it

So far it's not gaining a lot of momentum. And beside a large phoning campaign that is a bit low, I didn't see anything really nasty or even controversial. Nothing like paying your bodyguard as a parliament aid while he never landed foot in said parliament or your office.

Time will tell.

I wonder if by "hacking" they mean social engineering.

They mean the vague superset. No one checks with HN on terminology.

No need to worry guys, the pro-establishment bilderberg/Rothschild puppet will be elected as the next French president.

Will a more qualified woman be passed over for a less qualified man, yet again?

Probably as these leaks are about 4 days to late.

Good. This good old boys club of insiders is not good for the average person.

Research who is funding these people. Research what they do when they think no one is looking. Figure out who the media is pushing for, and vote the complete opposite.

Twitter is actively supressing the #MacronLeaks hashtag. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MacronLeaks&src=tyah

The propaganda machine is supporting Macron outright: http://i.imgur.com/rDppmI3.jpg

Call this karma.

Yes, vote for the candidate the totalitarian is supporting, that's always worked out for the best.

Do you really think le Pen is different in this regard? I mean, look at her dad. It boggled my mind during the US election that people thought the Republicans were not up to all the same dirty tricks just because their emails were not leaked. When there is asymmetrical information, I'd be very hesitant to form sweeping opinions.

By your logic, since the media seems to be pushing for Marcon, do you prefer Le Pen instead?

Edit: Since I saw you replied to this post that you do support Le Pen, and think she is best for the French people: Are you French, and if so, why do you think she is best? I'm not French, so I'm curious.

The ‘propaganda machine’ is supporting Macron because the alternative (Le Pen) is terrifying.

She's more terrifying to Parisians and non-French in my experience. I live in the south of France and in my encounters more people here seemed to fear Melanchon -- especially small business owners who, in my very unscientific polling preferred Fillon by a large margin. Taxes and regulations really crush independent business growth -- that's a bigger immediate issue than the immigration boogeyman or the EU. However, I want to stress this is just my own unscientific polling/conversations with people in my area (the Luberon specifically.)

The propaganda machine, as you call it, may be supporting Macron outright.

But the hacking machine is supporting Le Pen outright.

Who is funding the hacking machine? Why has only one candidate's emails been hacked? And why does this sound very similar to the 2016 US election, when only one candidate's emails were hacked?

In the US we know full well that the two parties are effectively the same in terms of corruption and back-room dealing. I'm guessing the same is true in France. How do we know what the "good old boys club" is doing if we only see half of that club? How can we fairly figure out what "these people" are doing if we only see the sordid details of some of these people?

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