Alwaght- A Russian official has rejected accusations suggesting Moscow has been involved in cyber attacks against the campaign of French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron.
"It resembles the accusations made by Washington, which to this day remain hollow, doing no honor to the people making them," Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, as cited by TASS.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that Japan-based anti-virus research group Trend Micro said the campaign of Macron's En Marche! movement was "targeted by Russia-linked hackers."
According to the Japanese cyber security firm, the Russian hackers may be the same hackers responsible for breaching the emails of Democratic officials before last year’s election in the U.S., according to warnings from a in a new report.
Trend Micro attributed the online spying campaign to an extremely prolific group it calls Pawn Storm, which American spy agencies have in turn accused of acting as an arm of Russia's intelligence apparatus. Trend Micro itself stopped short of saying who was behind the group, in line with common practice among security firms. French officials have also tended to be more circumspect than their American counterparts, repeatedly declining to tie Pawn Storm to any specific actor.
The firms report says Pawn Storm is an "active and aggressive espionage actor group" which also launched phishing campaigns against Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in April and May 2016 and set up phishing sites that targeted ministries of the Turkish government as well as the Turkish parliament in early 2016.
"Another credential phishing site was set up to target the parliament of Montenegro in October 2016 — this was likely the work of Pawn Storm as well," Trend Micro says in the report.
President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, however, said "As things stand now, it’s nothing but fake news," calling on Trend Micro to send Russia some information regarding the alleged attack.
