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| Campaigning has ended ahead of Sunday’s vote |
The campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron says it has been the target of a “massive hacking attack” after a trove of documents was released online.
The campaign said that genuine files were mixed up with fake ones in order to confuse people.
It said that it was clear the hackers wanted to undermine Mr Macron ahead of Sunday’s second round vote.
The centrist will face off against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
The documents were leaked on a file sharing website late on Friday, as the official presidential campaigning period drew to a close.
Opinion polls had indicated Mr Macron carried a lead of 20 percentage points or more over Ms Le Pen.
About nine gigabytes of data were posted online by an anonymous user.
The details are unclear so far, but Mr Macron’s En Marche movement said internal campaign documents, including emails and financial data, had been taken in an “act of massive, co-ordinated hacking”.
“The leaked files were obtained several weeks ago by hacking personal and professional email accounts of several officials of the movement,” it said in a statement.
The campaign said the documents showed only legitimate campaign activities.
That too remains unclear. The Macron camp has not blamed any specific party but said the hack clearly aimed to damage it and undermine French democracy,
It compared it to the leak of Democratic Party emails in last year’s US presidential election that was blamed on Russian hackers.
Last month security experts from the company Trend Micro said that Russian hackers were targeting Mr Macron’s campaign.
Russia has denied that it is behind attacks aimed at Mr Macron.