Wikileaks Releases 21,000 Macron Campaign Emails

More than 21,000 “verified” emails allegedly associated with the French presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron have been released by WikiLeaks.

The whistle-blowing organization claims the batch of 21,075 emails, dating from March 2009 to April 2017, are uniquely verified through its DKIM system, RT reported.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method which allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain. It is intended to prevent forged sender addresses in emails, a technique often used in phishing and email spam.

A full archive of 71,848 emails with 26,506 attachments from 4,493 unique senders is provided for context, according to a WikiLeaks statement.

It states that while only the 21,075 emails marked with its green “DKIM verified” banner are certified by WikiLeaks as genuine, it believes “based on statistical sampling” that the “overwhelming majority” of the remainder are also authentic.

“As the emails are often in chains and include portions of each other, it is usually possible to confirm the integrity [of] other emails in the chain as a result of the DKIM verified emails within it,” the statement reads.

Macron’s presidential campaign was hit with a huge email leak in the days before the presidential election on May 7. The electoral commission prohibited the French media from publishing the contents of the leak.

Last month French investigators said they found no traces of a Russian hacking group in the cyberattack on Macron’s election campaign.

The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, Guillaume Poupard, told AP the hack was “so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”