France, March 19 -- France's local elections are, in one aspect, particularly vulnerable to manipulation, with the large number of candidates making it easier for false information to circulate unnoticed.

"We are traditionally particularly attentive to the local elections, because it multiplies the possibilities of identity theft," explains Pierre Bonis, head of Afnic, the organisation which operates France's country code domain names, including ".fr".

Election manipulators often try to make fake candidate sites using a technique called "typosquatting" - or URL hijacking - which diverts users to sites designed to look like those of candidates or local news sites, but containing false information.

While the large number of candidat...