The US National Security Agency tipped off French officials that Russia was hacking the country’s computer systems during the presidential campaign and is working with the UK and Germany to help shield their upcoming elections from Moscow’s interference, reports The Guardian.
The NSA director, Admiral Mike Rogers, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the agency tipped off its French counterparts before the hack of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign became public 36 hours before he won the second round of the presidential campaign.
“We had become aware of Russian activity,” Rogers, who is also head of US Cyber Command, said. “We had talked to our French counterparts prior to the public announcements of the events that were publicly attributed this past weekend. We said, ‘Look we are watching the Russians, we’ve seen them penetrate your infrastructure, here’s what we’ve seen, what can we do to try to assist?”
“We’re doing similar things with our German and British counterparts, they have an upcoming election sequence,” Rogers added. “We’re all trying to figure out how we can learn from each other.”
He did not give details of what help the US is providing to the UK and Germany, who hold elections on June 8 and September 24 respectively, but US officials have previously said that they were seeking to share their experience of the 2016 presidential election where US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party communications and disseminated fake news, with the aim of getting Donald Trump election.
An estimated nine gigabytes of data was stolen from the Macron campaign and published online on Friday. Some of the material was authentic and some fake, apparently as a result of Macron’s deliberately feeding hackers confected emails to blunt the effectiveness of the attack.
The Macron campaign has described the attack as massive and coordinated, but has not formally blamed Russia. The French cybersecurity agency is still investigating the nature of the attack. The election commission said the leaked data apparently came from Macron’s “information systems and mail accounts from some of his campaign managers” – reminiscent of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee last year.
Rogers comments to the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday marked the first western official assessment that the Macron hack was sponsored by Moscow.
The Macron files published on Friday contained metadata in Cyrillic, implying they may have been edited on Russian software, and even included the name of a Russian intelligence contractor.
Cyber security experts said that did not represent conclusive proof that Russian intelligence was behind the hack.
“If was to play devil’s advocate, if you are a sophisticated about cyber security, you know very well that you will leave metadata traces and you also know that metadata is spoofable,” said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, the co-founder of SecurityScorecard, a cyber security monitoring and rating agency. “The whole description sounds a little too sloppy.”