text: The hackers behind the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email breach appear to have made similar attacks against Emmanuel Macron, a French candidate for president, as well as groups associated with German political parties, according to a new report. 
   
   The security firm Trend Micro reports that the hacking groups known as Fancy Bear, APT 28 and Pawn Storm attacked the French and German targets using similar phishing schemes to the one that caught the DNC. U.S. intelligence, as well as the bulk of experts, believe Fancy Bear is a Russian espionage operation. 
   
   “Pawn Storm has been making these types of attacks for a long time – we wrote our first report about them in 2014,” said Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro. 
   
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   Trend Micro believes the attackers contacted the Macron campaign using the domain “onedrive-en-marche.fr.” En Marche!, or “Forward!,” is a nickname of Macron’s political party, Association pour le renouvellement de la vie politique. The domain would therefore appear to be the En Marche! account for Microsoft’s file-hosting service, OneDrive. 
   
   In the DNC case, the hackers used the domain “actblues.com,” which was meant to be confused with the Democratic fundraising site ActBlue. 
   
   Macron, a centrist, is facing right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen in a contentious French presidential race already compared to the U.S. race of 2016. Le Pen, a pro-President Trump, anti-NATO candidate who has backed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month during a trip to Moscow. 
   
   The Macron attack is one of three new attacks outlined in the report, released early Tuesday. Fancy Bear, reports Trend Micro, also attacked the German political group Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, associated with Angela Merkel’s political party the Christian Democratic Union, and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, associated with the Social Democratic Party. Like France, Germany has federal elections in 2017. 
   
   Fancy Bear is known to use phishing attacks as an entry point for sophisticated malware exclusive to the group, known as X-Agent. It is one of a few ways the group can be tracked — Fancy Bear routs attacks through servers around the world that the organization reuses. 
   
   According to the Trend Micro report, those servers have stayed active over the past three years an average of six months apiece, with 10 lasting for more than a year. That is a long lifespan for these types of servers, which Trend Micro believes is emblematic of a unique characteristic of Fancy Bear: It does not mind being caught. 
   
   “Most espionage groups have tradecraft to stay low and slow, and remain in a system as long as possible. This group is loud and fast," Cabrera said. 
   
   Trend Micro has tracked an increase in the number of command-and-control servers being used by Fancy Bear. In late 2013, there were only five second-stage servers, which typically connect to the victim’s computer. That number exploded in early 2016, when it first crossed 15. In October, there were 26. Trend Micro believes this means the group has ramped up operations. 
   
   “Normal cybercriminals often don’t like media attention and even suspend their activities temporarily when their actions are discovered and written about,” concludes the report. "Pawn Storm doesn’t slow down at all. On the contrary: a lot has been written about Pawn Storm since fall of 2014, and their activities have only grown, both in aggressiveness and number.” ||||| Story highlights Macron's digital campaign manager says attempted hacks were unsuccessful 
   
   Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied any interest in interfering with the elections in France 
   
   (CNN) French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's campaign was targeted in recent weeks by hackers, using methods similar to the hacks in the United States targeting the Democratic National Committee last year, according to a new report by cybersecurity researchers. 
   
   Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm Trend Micro says it discovered four phony Web domain names that were very similar to the domain names of the Macron campaign -- presumably to try to trick careless campaign workers into accidentally compromising their email accounts. For example, a fake domain called mail-en-marche.fr was set up on April 12. Macron's party is En Marche! 
   
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   The firm was unable to tell whether any campaign staffers actually fell into any traps, or whether any campaign materials were compromised. 
   
   Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, confirmed there had been attempted hacks, but said they weren't successful. 
   
   "These are usual cyberattack tactics. We have set up a security team and every member of the staff is trained to report these attempts," he told CNN, assuring no party supporters' information had been compromised. ||||| The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report. 
   
   The report has heightened concerns that Russia may turn its playbook on France in an effort to harm Mr. Macron’s candidacy and bolster that of Mr. Macron’s rival, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen, in the final weeks of the French presidential campaign. 
   
   Security researchers at the cybersecurity firm, Trend Micro, said that on March 15 they spotted a hacking group they believe to be a Russian intelligence unit turn its weapons on Mr. Macron’s campaign — sending emails to campaign officials and others with links to fake websites designed to bait them into turning over passwords. 
   
   The group began registering several decoy internet addresses last month and as recently as April 15, naming one onedrive-en-marche.fr and another mail-en-marche.fr to mimic the name of Mr. Macron’s political party, En Marche.
target: – Hillary Clinton says she lost the 2016 election due in part to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, looks poised to become France's next president despite a seemingly similar effort to derail his campaign. According to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, Macron—who will compete against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the May 7 election—appears to have been targeted by the same Russian hackers who took aim at Clinton's campaign, though officials say they didn’t manage to steal staffers’ email passwords, per the New York Times. The scheme involved emails sent to campaign officials with links to web addresses almost identical to those of Macron's party, CNN reports. Trend Micro—which also claims the hackers targeted groups linked to political parties in Germany, per the Hill—says it traced those addresses to Fancy Bear, the same group US intelligence has blamed for the DNC hack. The Macron campaign had previously suggested Russia might be behind a "highly sophisticated" effort to access campaign emails using shady web pages that were "pixel perfect" matches to originals, with only tiny differences in URLs. In response to the report, however, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin says Russia has "never interfered" in foreign elections and the latest charges are "a reminder of the accusations that were heard from Washington just recently and that have remained unconfirmed to this day."