PARIS // French authorities have warned it could be a criminal offence to republish data obtained from a hack of presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron's campaign emails, in an effort to prevent the breach from influencing the outcome of the election on Sunday.
Mr Macron's team said a "massive" hack had dumped emails, documents and campaign financing information online just before campaigning ended on Friday night.
"On the eve of the most important election for our institutions, the commission calls on everyone present on internet sites and social networks, primarily the media, but also all citizens, to show responsibility and not to pass on this content, so as not to distort the sincerity of the ballot," the French election commission said.
"The dissemination of such data, which have been fraudulently obtained and in all likelihood may have been mingled with false information, is liable to be classified as a criminal offence," it said.
The data leak emerged as polls predicted Mr Macron was on course for a comfortable victory over far-right leader Marine Le Pen, with the final surveys showing his support at about 62 per cent.
However, the election commission's order may be difficult to enforce in an era where people get much of their news online, information flows freely across borders and many users are anonymous.
French media covered the hack in various ways, with left-leading Liberation giving it prominence on its website, but television news channels opting not to mention it.
As much as 9 gigabytes of data were posted on a profile called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a site that allows anonymous document sharing, late on Friday.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible, but Mr Macron's political movement said the hack was an attempt to destabilise democracy and to damage the party.
"The En Marche [Forard] Movement has been the victim of a massive and coordinated hack," it said.
En Marche said the leaked documents dealt with the normal operations of a campaign and included some information on campaign accounts. It said the hackers had mixed false documents with authentic ones to "sow doubt and disinformation".
France is the latest nation to see a major election overshadowed by allegations of manipulation through hacking after US intelligence agencies said in January that Russian president Vladimir Putin had ordered hacking of parties tied to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to influence the election on behalf of Republican Donald Trump.
The Kremlin has denied it was behind any such attacks, although Mr Macron's camp renewed complaints against Russian media and a hackers' group operating in Ukraine.
Sunday's election is seen as the most important in France for decades, with two diametrically opposed views of Europe and the country's place in the world at stake.
Ms Le Pen would close borders and quit the euro currency, while Mr Macron wants closer European cooperation and an open economy.
On Friday night as the #Macronleaks hashtag buzzed around social media, Florian Philippot, deputy leader of Ms Le Pen's Front National party, tweeted "Will Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism has deliberately kept silent?"
Vitali Kremez, director of research with New York-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, said his review indicated that APT28, a group tied to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence directorate, was behind the leak.
APT28 last month registered decoy internet addresses to mimic the name of En Marche, which it likely used send tainted emails to hack into the campaign's computers, Mr Kremez said. Those domains include onedrive-en-marche.fr and mail-en-marche.fr.
"If indeed driven by Moscow, this leak appears to be a significant escalation over the previous Russian operations aimed at the US presidential election, expanding the approach and scope of effort from simple espionage efforts towards more direct attempts to sway the outcome," he said.
Former economy minister Macron's campaign has previously complained about attempts to hack its emails, blaming Russian interests in part for the cyber attacks.
* Reuters with additional reporting from Agence France-Presse
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