Hackers Came, but the French Were Prepared | Hacker News Reader

Hackers Came, but the French Were Prepared

nytimes.com

26 pointskawera6 comments

This is a smart way to combat these political hacking campaigns, it seems. Make them verify the information like any other venue, or they'll wind up releasing bogus receipts for bath salts shipped to the French Parliament.

Make them double check. Press them for time, and force errors on their part. Expecting your entire staff to be able to spot a phish is simply not good enough.

It may also have had something to do with the press simply refusing to publish anything from the leaks [1]. In fact that may be more relevant.

I'm not sure what I think about this. Firstly this is the government censoring the press by threatening individual reporters with criminal charges ... I don't know what to say. This is obviously very, very bad.

It completely baffles me how anyone can be happy with Macron.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2017/05/06/french-media-warned-not-to-p...

Just tout clarify. The media blackout isn't specific to macronleaks or to this election. It is due to the facts the macronleaks were released right before the "période de reserve": * it is illegal to broadcast or print any political document on the day of the election and the day before (French electoral code - L49), * it is illegal for any candidate to publish any new argument if opponents would not have enough time to reply before the end of the campaign (French electoral code L48-2).

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do;jsessionid=8C1A...

You are either completely missing the point of the discussion or being obtuse on purpose to push a political agenda.

First of all: There's a law in France that prevents campaign and propaganda 48hrs before the vote. Similar laws exist in other countries (e.g. Spain, where it's 24hr).

Now back to the point: The planting of misleading information pushed the attackers to delay the publishing of the information so much that they fell under those 48hr previous to the vote and still dropped bogus data.

A measure of defense in depth saved Macron's bacon.

France has a law that campaigning has to end the day before the election. Perhaps the news could be construed as campaigning-related and thus prevented?

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