A large trove of emails from the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been posted online, just days before voters go to the polls to choose the country's next President.
Some nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for posting the data or whether the emails were genuine.
In a statement, Mr Macron's political movement En Marche! (Onwards!) confirmed that it had been hacked.
"The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information," the statement said.
A similar hack happened to the Democratic Party in the US prior to the 2016 election.
An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing French rules which forbid any commentary liable to influence an election, and which took effect at midnight French time on Friday.
Comments about the email dump began to appear on Friday evening just hours before the official ban on campaigning began.
The ban is due to stay in place until the last polling stations close on Sunday at 8pm.
Opinion polls show independent centrist Mr Macron is set to beat National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in Sunday's second round of voting, in what is seen to be France's most important election in decades.
Reuters / Newshub.
