WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign said on Saturday some of its internal communications were hacked and blamed the Iranian government, citing past hostilities between Mr. Trump and Iran without providing direct evidence.

The Republican’s campaign statement came shortly after news website Politico reported it had begun receiving emails in July from an anonymous source offering authentic documents from inside Mr. Trump’s operation, including a report about running mate JD Vance’s “potential vulnerabilities.”

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement.

Late on Saturday, Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social app that Microsoft had just informed the campaign that Iran had hacked one of its websites. He cast blame on Iran, adding they were “only able to get publicly available information.” He did not elaborate further on the hack.

Reuters has not independently verified the identity of the alleged hackers or their motivation.

The Trump campaign referred to a Friday report from Microsoft researchers that said Iranian government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a “high-ranking official” on a US presidential campaign in June. The hackers had taken over an account belonging to a former political advisor and then used it to target the official, the report said. That report did not provide further details on the targets’ identities.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to name the targeted officials or provide additional details after the report was published.

Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York said in an email that “the Iranian government neither possesses nor harbors any intent or motive to interfere in the United States presidential election.”

“We do not accord any credence to such reports,” it added in response to the Trump campaign’s allegations.

On Friday, in response to Microsoft’s findings, Iran’s United Nations mission told Reuters its cyber capabilities were “defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces,” and that it had no plans to launch cyberattacks.

The former president had tense relations with Iran while in office. Under Mr. Trump, the United States killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and withdrew from a multilateral Iran nuclear deal.

“The Iranians know that President Trump will stop their reign of terror just like he did in his first four years in the White House,” Mr. Cheung said.

Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt in July. While there have been no suggestions that the suspect was linked to Iran, CNN reported last month that the US had intelligence about an Iranian plot against Mr. Trump. Iran has denied such charges.

Late last month, a senior intelligence official told reporters in a briefing that Tehran and Moscow maintain their same presidential preferences as in past cycles, where Iranian operatives will attempt to tear down the Republican ticket while Russia has made efforts to smear Democrats, according to prior intelligence community assessments. — Reuters

LAS VEGAS — A recent surge in Global Positioning System (GPS) “spoofing,” a form of digital attack which can send commercial airliners off course, has entered an intriguing new dimension, according to cybersecurity researchers: The ability to hack time.

There has been a 400% surge in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial airliners in recent months, according to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP. Many of those incidents involve illicit ground-based GPS systems, particularly around conflict zones, that broadcast incorrect positions to the surrounding airspace in a bid to confuse incoming drones or missiles.

“We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it’s actually a source of time,” Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, said during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.

“We’re starting to see reports of the clocks on board airplanes during spoofing events start to do weird things.”

In an interview with Reuters, Mr. Munro cited a recent incident in which an aircraft operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly sent forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally-encrypted communication systems.

The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset its onboard systems, said Mr. Munro. He declined to identify the airline or aircraft in question.

In April, Finnair temporarily paused flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS spoofing which Tallin blamed on neighboring Russia.

GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground devices that transmit radio beams to guide planes towards landing. However, it is also fairly easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and easy to obtain parts, and limited technological knowledge.

“Is it going to make a plane crash? No, it’s not,” Mr. Munro told Reuters.

“What it does is it just creates a little confusion. And you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, something else minor happens, and then something serious happens.” — Reuters

KYIV — President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that Ukrainian forces were fighting in the surprise offensive in Russia’s Kursk, as the border region’s authorities rushed to evacuate civilians from areas at risk.

Moscow’s forces are in their sixth day of intense battles against Kyiv’s largest incursion into Russian territory since the start of the war, which left southwestern parts of Russia vulnerable before reinforcement started arriving.

In a sign of the gravity of the situation, Russia imposed a sweeping security regime in three border regions on Saturday, while Belarus, a staunch ally of Moscow, sent more troops to its border with Ukraine, accusing Kyiv of violating its air space.

In his nightly video address, Mr. Zelensky said he had discussed the operation with top Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi, vowing to restore justice after Russia launched a full-scale aggression on its smaller neighbor in February 2022.

“Today, I received several reports from commander-in-chief Syrskyi regarding the front lines and our actions to push the war onto the aggressor’s territory,” he said.

“Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and ensure the necessary pressure on the aggressor.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin cast the Ukrainian attack — which military analysts say caught the Kremlin off-guard — as a major provocation.

Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, said on Wednesday the attacks had been halted, but Russia has thus far failed to push the Ukrainian forces back over the border.

Russian military bloggers say the situation had stabilized after Russia’s reinforcements, though they said Ukraine was swiftly building up forces.

Early on Sunday, Kursk officials said that 13 people were injured in the city after debris from a destroyed Ukraine-launched missile fell onto a nine-storey residential building.

Alexei Smirnov, Kursk’s acting governor, ordered local authorities to speed up the evacuation of civilians in areas at risk. On Saturday, Russia’s TASS state news agency reported that more than 76,000 people had been evacuated.

Both Kyiv and Moscow deny targeting civilians in their attacks in the war, which has killed thousands of people and displaced millions of Ukrainians, and has no end in sight.

Russian military bloggers say that fighting is taking place as deep as 20 km (12 miles) inside the Kursk region, prompting some of them to question why Ukraine was able to pierce the Kursk region so easily. — Reuters