India seeks a probe after Apple sent an email warning of a state-sponsored attack to opposition MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, who wrote to PM Modi and Amit Shah on Tuesday, demanding action.
Following the US tech firm Apple’s warning to several lawmakers and prominent personalities in the country that their iPhones were likely hacked in a “state-sponsored” attack, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been asked to step in.
After learning from Apple about a potential government-linked attack, opposition MP Priyanka Chaturvedi wrote to Modi and Amit Shah on Tuesday, demanding action.
The IT giant sent an email warning to Chaturvedi along with other notable public figures, journalists, and opposition lawmakers. According to the message, “state-sponsored attackers” might have targeted them and attempted to infiltrate their iPhones based on “who you are or what you do.”
“I believe it is a violation of my fundamental rights and contrary to the laws of our country to engage in sophisticated hacking in an attempt to monitor my actions and movements,” Chaturvedi, who is a member of the Shiv Sena party, said in her letter to the Indian prime minister.
If the warning is true, she continued, it “raises serious questions” about the nation’s intelligence services singled out for persecuting opposition figures. Shah received a similar letter requesting that the situation be looked into.
Asaduddin Owaisi of the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), Shashi Tharoor of the Congress Party, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, and Supriya Shrinate of the Nationalist Congress Party were among the opposition leaders who claimed to have received similar notifications on their iPhones indicating that “state-sponsored attackers” were attempting to hack their devices.
The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) president Samir Saman, as well as the journalists Siddharth Vardarajan and Sriram Karri, claimed to have also received the warning. According to Tharoor, he verified that the email he received was from an Apple ID.
“Apple does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker,” the company said on Tuesday in a statement, cited by Times of India. “State-sponsored attackers are very well-funded and sophisticated, and their attacks evolve over time,” the US giant said, adding that detecting such attacks relies on threat intelligence signals that are “often imperfect and incomplete.”
Qatar has sentenced eight Indian naval officers who worked for a private company that trained Qatar’s armed forces to death in Qatar for spying for Israel.
Apple added clarification, stating that it’s possible for some threat alerts to be “false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected.” Because “that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection,” it stated that it was unable to offer details about what triggers such danger notifications.
The Indian Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnav, stated that the details provided by Apple on the matter appeared to be “vague and non-specific in nature.” According to Times Now, Vaishnaw added that the corporation had sent out the same warning in 150 other nations.
He stated that the Indian government has been requested to “investigate” the situation in a post on X, the previous Twitter platform. Vaishnaw went on to say that Apple has received requests for “real” and “accurate” information to aid the inquiry.
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