Cyber-security firm claims Russian hackers targeting Emmanuel Macron

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The campaign said the attempts were unsuccessful.

The exchange marked a return to more traditional campaigning after the extraordinary "battle of Whirlpool", when both candidates sought to harness France's blue-collar vote at a threatened home appliances factory. Russian state media has praised Le Pen for her anti-European Union policies.

She said they noticed six or five or 10 attempts in March and April but the campaign staff was "thoroughly trained to be careful with their emails and to spot suspicious activities".

The security firm Trend Micro reports that the hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28 and Pawn Storm attacked the French and German targets using similar phishing schemes to the one that caught the DNC.

Unmasking groups behind any spying campaigns is one of the most challenging aspects of cybersecurity, but Hacquebord said he was confident that Trend Micro had succeeded.

"There are hundreds if not thousands of attacks on our computer system, our database and our sites, and by chance this happens to come from the Russian border", said Macron campaign manager Richard Ferrand, according to Politico.

The spy group, also known as APT28, is believed to be behind the attacks past year on the US Democratic National Committee, thought to be aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.

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French officials have also tended to be more circumspect than their American counterparts, repeatedly declining to tie Pawn Storm to any specific actor. In particular, the company pointed to the use of a @mail.com address to register the domains; an IP address (194.187.249 [.] 135) that was identified by the US Department of Homeland Security as being used by Russian hackers; and other associated IP addresses registered with the hosting service THCservers, which has been previously used by Fancy Bear. On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the notion that Russian hackers were targeting the French election as "nothing but fiction". "We would be pleased if this investigative group sent us the information, and then we could check it", Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.

"There is a revolt of the people against the elite" seen in Britain's Brexit vote and "probably" in the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, Le Pen said in a TF-1 television show.

She said that the attempts were "absolutely not successful" at accessing campaign workers' passwords to retrieve their email. The campaign previously complained of being targeted by electronic spying operations that it hinted had their origins in Russian Federation but offered little evidence to back the assertion at the time.

Emmanuel Macron won the first round of the French presidential elections on April 23.

The second round of France's presidential contest pitting Macron against Kremlin-friendly far right leader Marine Le Pen is two weeks away.

A security firm claimed Tuesday that a new cyberattack against the campaign offices of the front-runner in France's presidential race carried similar digital "fingerprints" to the suspected Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and others.

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