by William Craddick, Disobedient Media:

A fresh release of emails, documents and photos was dumped onto online messageboard 4chan late this morning in the latest leak to hit Emmanuel Macron’s campaign ahead of France’s second round of presidential elections. The release purports to contain content from Macron and various staff members.

Files from the release are reported to have been sent to members at Chicago Hacking Conference THOTCON, who have verified their authenticity. Analysts who examined portions of the release say that the owners of the email accounts were practicing very poor security and appeared to have been targeted by a number of hacking methods, including spearphishing and bruteforce attacks. Staff members whose emails are contained in the leak include Quentin Lafay, Alain Torret and Pierre Person, among others. The cache of documents appears to be incredibly large and contains emails spanning back to over a decade ago in addition to financial data. The original leaker of the emails is currently unknown.

Document publisher Wikileaks has tweeted that they are aware of the release and are working to verify its contents, which they report has over 9Gb of data in total, with the most recent document dated April 24th, 2017. Wikileaks speculated about who might benefit from the leak, as it comes too late to influence the impending French presidential election, but could be used to boost hostility towards Russia and spending on intelligence capabilities. The leak is described as “significant.” Due to the massive size of the dump, Wikileaks has stated it would be economically unfeasible to fabricate the entirety of the release.

Reuters has reported that the Macron campaign has confirmed they were the victims of a hacking attack. En Marche has said the emails are a mix of legitimate and faked documents. However, Wikileaks has cast doubts on this claim, noting that they have yet to find a single example of forged content in the release.

Rebel Media’s Washington Bureau Chief Jack Posobiec has claimed that early discoveries in the cache may show the Macron campaign and French National Police discussing means to infiltrate protest groups using militant tactics and banners, though it is unclear what the writers of the message meant by this.

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