Voters, meanwhile, mostly waved away
the news, saying their decision came down to more consequential matters. And
they backed Macron by a wide margin, 66 to 34 percent, handing him a decisive
victory over Le Pen.
“The
release is not important to me,” said Michèle Monnery, 74, after casting her
vote for Macron in Laon, a small city in the north. “What matters to me is
stopping Le Pen.”
Analysts immediately presumed the
intrusion was designed to prop up Le Pen in the final stretch of a bruising
campaign that had the power to dictate the future of an integrated Europe. They
refrained, initially, from assigning blame for the hack, although experts
concluded that its propagation began in the United States with a cluster of
Twitter accounts run by members of a far-right movement whose aim is a
whites-only state.
Now multiple research firms have linked the
hacks to those that compromised the Democratic National Committee last year —
links suggesting that Russian intelligence services accused of interfering in
the American election may have sought to do the same in France. The finding was
made last month, after the first round of voting, by Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm that
fingered Russian hackers, known variously as Pawn Storm, APT28 and Fancy Bear.
Recent analysis by Flashpoint Intel in New York came to the same conclusion,
namely that the French hack “appears to be linked to the Russian
state-sponsored campaign by APT28
