HACKERS CAME, BUT THE FRENCH      WERE PREPARED

PARIS (TIP): Everyone saw the hackers coming. The National Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macron’s 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 staff at Macron’s makeshift headquarters in the 15th Arrondissement at the edge of Paris didn’t need the NSA to tell them they were being targeted: In December, after the former investment banker and finance minister had emerged as easily the most anti-Russian, pro-Nato and pro- European Union candidate in the presidential race, they began receiving phishing emails.

The phishing mails were “high quality”, said Macron’s digital director, Mounir Mahjoubi: They included the actual names of members of the campaign staff, and at first glance appeared to come from them.

Even before then, the Macron campaign had begun looking for ways to make life a little harder for the Russians “We went on a counteroffensive,” said Mahjoubi. “We couldn’t guarantee 100% protection” from the attacks, “so we asked: what can we do?” Mahjoubi opted for a classic “cyber blurring” strategy 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,” Mahjoubi said. “I don’t think we prevented them. We just slowed them down,” he said. “Even if it made them lose one minute, we’re happy,” he said.

The Russians did a poor job of covering their tracks. The metadata tied to a handful of documents —code that shows the origins of a document — show some passed through Russian computers and were edited by Russian users. Some Excel documents were modified using software unique to Russian versions of Microsoft Windows. (NYT Services)