In a new chapter in this new world of election campaign cyberwars, the Macron campaign showed a brilliant way to counter the hackers. 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….
So they basically ambushed the hackers and left them chasing false trails and dead ends, and even planted their own false documents. Truly brilliant, utterly simple and devastatingly effective: Since you know they’re coming, may as well let them in and confuse, sandbag, and ultimately overwhelm them. And notice there have been very little bombshells, fake or otherwise in the news re: Macron? The Macron plan worked!
And indicating how successful it was, Wikileaks was totally flustered in finding anything:
(Wikileaks) 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.”
and at last check was left with this:
“#MacronLeaks assessment update: several Office files have Cyrillic meta data. Unclear if by design, incompetence, or Slavic employee.”
What’s fantastic about this is it is replicable for future campaigns.
Pretty clever... Stratégie brillante tres bon !
Soon we will open the champagne!
h/t mahakali overdrive, she’s found a great story from France on how one of the false documents was revealed: observers.france24.com/...