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President Putin; ANSSI chief Poupard

France’s head of cyber security finds no Russian hackers

In April the New York Times (NYT), published a piece of fiction, titled: Russian Hackers Who Targeted Clinton Appear to Attack France’s Macron. But France's head of cyber security says his agency found no trace of Russians.

Published: June 3, 2017, 2:50 pm

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    If, as the NYT claims, the authors of the attack on the Macron campaign were the same as in the Clinton case then the Clinton campaign was likely not hacked by Russians at all.

    In an interview in his office Thursday with The Associated Press, the head of France’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a Russian hacking group behind the attack.

    Guillaume Poupard said the Macron campaign hack “was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone”.

    He said they found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28 was responsible. The group has been blamed for other attacks including on the US presidential campaign.

    Poupard said the attack lacked sophistication which “means that we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country.”

    But the NYT report quoted a “cybersecurity firm” which blamed a “group” by confusing phishing emails for “cyber attacks”. Phishing email scams are generally not attributable at all.

    Likewise APT’s, “Advanced Persistent Threats”, are not “groups” but collections of methods that can be copied and re-used and are no longer attributable. This did not stop the NYT in manufacturing a fake report:

    “The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report.”

    The newspaper then went on and explained at length how the “Russians” were involved.

    The “Macron attack” was very strange. Gigabytes of campaign emails were released by “the hackers” just hours before a media silence right before the election.

    The campaign curiously found fakes with Cyrillic markings almost right away and blamed “Russia”. The leak appeared more to have been a planned Public Relations stunt, and not a cyber attack.

    Poupard is director general of the France’s cyber-defense agency known in French as ANSSI. Its experts were immediately summoned on May 5 in the closing hours of the presidential race to look into the leaks.

    Speaking at a meeting with senior editors of leading international news agencies on Thursday, the Russian president said that the “Russo-phobic hysteria” in the US was aimed “against the current president of the US to prevent him from working normally”.

    He added that economic restrictions against Russia have had “zero effect” and predicted that the current strain in relations will ease, because “it’s counterproductive and harmful”. He also welcomed Trump’s set of “fresh eyes” to diplomatic relations between the two countries.

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