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LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/world/europe/hackers-came-but-the-french-were-prepared.html
Everyone saw the hackers coming.
The National Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macrons bare-bones technology team. And mindful of what happened in the American presidential campaign, the team created dozens of false email accounts, complete with phony documents, to confuse the attackers.
The Russians, for their part, were rushed and a bit sloppy, leaving a trail of evidence that was not enough to prove for certain they were working for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin but which strongly suggested they were part of his broader information warfare campaign.
Even before then, the Macron campaign had begun looking for ways to make life a little harder for the Russians, showing a level of skill and ingenuity that was missing in Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and at the Democratic National Committee, which had minimal security protections and for months ignored F.B.I. warnings that its computer system had been penetrated.
We went on a counteroffensive, said Mr. Mahjoubi. We couldnt guarantee 100 percent protection from the attacks, so we asked: what can we do? Mr. Mahjoubi opted for a classic cyber-blurring strategy, well known to banks and corporations, creating false email accounts and filled them with phony documents the way a bank teller keeps fake bills in the cash drawer in case of a robbery.
We created false accounts, with false content, as traps. We did this massively, to create the obligation for them to verify, to determine whether it was a real account, Mr. Mahjoubi said. I dont think we prevented them. We just slowed them down, he said. Even if it made them lose one minute, were happy, he said.
Mr. Mahjoubi refused to reveal the nature of the false documents that were created, or to say whether, in the Friday document dump that was the result of the hacking campaign, there were false documents created by the Macron campaign.
But he did note that in the mishmash that constituted the Friday dump, there were some authentic documents, some phony documents of the hackers own manufacture, some stolen documents from various companies, and some false emails created by the campaign.
During all their attacks we put in phony documents. And that forced them to waste time, he said. By the quantity of the documents we put in, he added, and documents that might interest them.
With only 18 people in the digital team, many of them occupied in producing campaign materials like videos, Mr. Mahjoubi hardly had the resources to track down the hackers. We didnt have time to try to catch them, he said. But he has his suspicions about their identity. Simultaneously with the phishing attacks, the Macron campaign was being attacked by the Russian media with a profusion of fake news.
Oddly, the Russians did a poor job of covering their tracks. That made it easier for private security firms, on alert after the efforts to manipulate the American election, to search for evidence.
In mid-March, researchers with Trend Micro, the cybersecurity giant based in Tokyo, watched the same Russian intelligence unit behind some of the Democratic National Committee hacks start building the tools to hack Mr. Macrons campaign. They set up web domains mimicking those of Mr. Macrons En Marche! Party, and began dispatching emails with malicious links and fake login pages designed to bait campaign staffers into divulging their usernames and passwords, or to click on a link that would give the Russians a toehold onto the campaigns network.
It was the classic Russian playbook, security researchers say, but this time the world was prepared. The only good news is that this activity is now commonplace, and the general population is so used to the idea of a Russian hand behind this, that it backfired on them, said John Hultquist, the director of cyberespionage analysis at FireEye, the Silicon Valley security firm.
Mr. Hultquist noted that the attack was characterized by haste, and a trail of digital mistakes. There was a time when Russian hackers were characterized by their lack of sloppiness, Mr. Hultquist said. When they made mistakes, they burned their entire operation and started anew. But since the invasion of Ukraine and Crimea, he said, weve seen them carry out brazen, large scale attacks, perhaps because there have been few consequences for their actions.
The hackers also made the mistake of releasing information that was, by any campaign standard, pretty boring. The nine gigabytes worth of purportedly stolen emails and files from the Macron campaign was spun as scandalous material, but turned out to be almost entirely the humdrum of campaign workers trying to conduct ordinary life in the midst of the election maelstrom.
Its clear they were rushed, Mr. Hultquist said. If this was APT28, he said, using the name for a Russian group believed to be linked to the GRU, a military intelligence agency, they have been caught in the act, and it has backfired for them.
Now, he said, the failure of the Macron hacks could just push Russian hackers to improve their methods.
They may have to change their playbook entirely, Mr. Hultquist said.