National Security Director Adm. Mike Rogers, who heads up US Cyber Command, said Tuesday that the US warned France about Russian cyberactivity prior to the hack of then-presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron last week.
“We had talked to our French counterparts … and we gave them a heads up: ‘Look, we are watching the Russians. We are seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure. Here’s what we’ve seen … what can we do to assist?'” Rogers told lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“We are doing the same with our German counterparts (and) our British counterparts,” he added.
Macron had been the victim of a “massive and coordinated hacking operation,” his campaign team said.
Around 14.5 gigabytes of emails, personal and business documents were posted to the text-sharing site Pastebin through links to more than 70,000 files, a CNN look at the data showed.
Officials from Macron’s En Marche! party said in a statement that the perpetrators of the hack had mixed fake documents with authentic ones “to create confusion and misinformation.”
The document dump happened Friday night, less than 48 hours before the country voted in the final round of the presidential election, which Macron won over the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
It was not clear who was behind the document dump, but the hack targeting Macron’s campaign used methods similar to the suspected Russian hacks of the Democratic National Committee last year in United States, according to a report issued in April by cybersecurity researchers.
