Apple has issued warnings to several Indian lawmakers, including those from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s main opposition, alerting them that their iPhones are potential targets of state-sponsored attacks. This development comes just months before the general elections in India.
Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Indian opposition, confirmed in a media briefing that his team had received the alert from Apple. Other prominent politicians, such as Shashi Tharoor from the Congress party, Akhilesh Yadav from the Samajwadi Party, Mahua Moitra from the All India Trinamool Congress, and Priyanka Chaturvedi from Shiv Sena, also reported receiving similar notifications from Apple regarding security threats to their iPhones.
In addition to politicians, journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Sriram Karri, as well as Samir Saran, the President of Observer Research Foundation (ORF) India, have stated that they too received identical warnings from Apple.
Apple confirmed that it has sent threat notifications to individuals but did not attribute them to any specific state-sponsored attacker. The company stated that detecting such attacks is challenging and that some notifications may be false alarms or that certain attacks may go undetected.
India’s IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw stated that the government is concerned about the matter and is investigating to uncover the truth. He downplayed the allegations, describing the threat notifications as “vague” and merely “estimations.”
It is worth noting that the Indian government has faced accusations of deploying the Pegasus spyware, which is blacklisted by the U.S. government, on activists and opposition leaders for years. However, there is no official statement or confirmation directly blaming New Delhi for the recent episode.
Apar Gupta, a senior privacy activist, expressed concern about the timing of these notifications and called for an independent and transparent technical analysis from the Indian government regarding its spyware purchases and deployments.
Apple has previously recommended users who receive such alerts to activate Lockdown mode, a security measure aimed at protecting individuals like journalists, politicians, attorneys, and human rights advocates from state-sponsored spyware intrusions. This mode restricts certain features to prevent malicious attacks.
Since enabling the threat notification feature, Apple has alerted individuals in nearly 150 countries.
In conclusion, Apple’s warnings to Indian lawmakers about potential state-sponsored attacks on their iPhones have raised concerns ahead of the general elections in India. The Indian government is investigating the matter, while Apple continues to provide security measures to protect individuals from such threats.
