The Biden administration has taken its first step to retaliate for China’s broad hack of American telecommunications firms, moving to ban the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States.

In a notice issued last week to China Telecom Americas — the U.S. subsidiary of one of China’s largest communications firms — the Commerce Department detailed a preliminary finding that the company’s presence in American networks and its provision of cloud services posed a national security risk to the United States.

For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked.

The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.

A hacking group linked to the Iranian government tried to breach the email accounts of presidential campaign staffers as part of a wider effort to gather intelligence ahead of the US election, Microsoft Corp. said Friday.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that it had been hacked and blamed Iran for breaking into its data, days after Microsoft revealed the terror-backing nation has been ramping up online activity in an attempt to influence the US election.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung made the announcement following report from Politico that said the outlet had received anonymous emails that included documents from inside Trump’s campaign operation.

The Maricopa County Elections Department announced Friday that some of its voting locations are experiencing outages because of the worldwide tech outage.

"Due to the global tech outage, Maricopa County Elections is also experiencing an outage at some voting locations," the county department wrote in a post on X Friday morning. "Please visit Locations.Maricopa.Vote for the most up-to-date information about locations that are open and their hours of operations."

Early voting for Arizona's July 30th primary election began on July 3rd.

Windows computers around the world are being hit by the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) thanks to an outage caused by services provided by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The issue has impacted everyone from banks to airlines, with flights grounded, grocery carts abandoned, and productivity even lower than usual for a Friday.

Fortunately, CrowdStrike has since announced at 2:30 a.m. ET that it has identified the update causing the issue and rolled it back. The company also offered a workaround for anyone having problems:

U.S. phone giant AT&T confirmed Friday it will begin notifying millions of consumers about a fresh data breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal the phone records of “nearly all” of its customers, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

In a statement, AT&T said that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers, as well as AT&T records of calls and text messages — such as who contacted who by phone or text — during a six-month period between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022. 

A file containing about 10 billion individual passwords was posted on an online hacking forum in what could be the largest such compilation of leaked passwords ever. The file was posted on July 4, and contains passwords compromised in both recent and old data breaches all over the world.