Trend Micro researchers said today Fancy Bear, also known as Pawn Storm, targeted Emmanuel Macron's presidential campaign in France.
Macron has blamed Russia for hacking his campaign in an attempt to swing the French election by spreading misleading information about him via Kremlin-backed news media reports, Politico reported earlier this year.
Researchers listed Macron's campaign website as one that was targeted with a spearphishing campaign by the cyberespionage group. The threat group set up at least four phishing domains in the last two months that mimicked Macron's sites, all of which were registered by the same registrant in around the same time.
“As far as we know they started around March 15, 2017 and different attacks may have happened until after April 17, 2017,” a Trend Micro spokesperson told SC Media. “From the domain names that were created we think that both credential phishing were done as attempts to infect with malware.”
French authorities were notified of the campaigns. “Generally speaking Pawn Storm is known to have very good social engineering skills,” Trend Micro said. “When needed they might use 0days and they don't give up easily.”
