Viva la France! How France outsmarted the hackers/dumpers.

[pnwmom]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/06/did-macron-outsmart-campaign-hackers

Wikileaks jumped on the document dump, but didn’t seem to be familiar with the material in it. Responding to the Macron statement that some of the items were bogus, Wikileaks tweeted, “We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us.”

Ah, but there’s the rub. As reported by The Daily Beast, part of the Macron campaign strategy against Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm and Apt28) was to sign on to the phishing pages and plant bogus information.

“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast for its earlier article on this subject.

In the end, whoever made the dump may not have known what is real and what is false, which would explain in part the odd timing. After the disruptive revelations of the Democratic National Committee hacks in the United States, the public is conditioned to think that if there’s a document dump like this, it has to be incriminating. By putting it out just before the news blackout, when Macron cannot respond in detail, the dump becomes both the medium and the message.

[Hekate]

1. Live and learn, Grasshopper

[Cary]

2. The dialectic of warfare

[iluvtennis]

3. Thanks for the post...a tactic that future election campaigns need to use to protect themselves.

[certainot]

4. i wonder if france has hundreds of fascist radio stations reinforcing

the russians and providing years of material to piggyback with their trolling and hacking works