Mr. Mahjoubi refused to reveal the nature of the false documents<br />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.<br />“By the quantity of the documents we put in,” he added, “and documents that might interest them.”<br />With only 18 people in the digital team, many of them occupied in producing campaign materials<br />like videos, Mr. Mahjoubi hardly had the resources to track down the hackers.<br />“If this was APT28,” he said, using the name for a Russian group believed to be linked to the GRU,<br />a military intelligence agency, “they have been caught in the act, and it has backfired for them.”<br />Now, he said, the failure of the Macron hacks could just push Russian hackers to improve their methods<br />But he did note that in the mishmash that constituted the Friday dump, there were some authentic documents, some phony documents<br />of the hackers’ own manufacture, some stolen documents from various companies, and some false emails created by the campaign.<br />Other documents had last been modified by Russian usernames, including one person<br />that researchers identified as a 32-year-old employee of Eureka CJSC, based in Moscow, a Russian technology company that works closely with the Russian Ministry of Defense and intelligence agencies.<br />“We couldn’t 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<br />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.
