Apple Alerts Indian Opposition Leaders Of State-Sponsored iPhone Attackers, Cites Lack Of Specific Attribution

Leading figures in Indian politics and journalism, including opposition leaders, have been warned by Apple Inc. AAPL of potential state-sponsored attacks targeting their iPhones.

What Happened: Apple warned over half a dozen individuals about potential security risks. Prominent figures such as Shashi Tharoor of the Congress party, Akhilesh Yadav from the Samajwadi Party, and Shiv Sena’s Priyanka Chaturvedi, among others, have received these warnings, TechCrunch reported.

Others who received similar alerts from Apple include Rahul Gandhi, a prominent opposition leader, Siddharth Varadarajan, and Sriram Karri, both journalists, and Samir Saran, President of the Observer Research Foundation India.

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Apple confirmed the issuance of these threat notifications but stopped short of attributing them to a specific state-sponsored attacker. The tech giant cited the difficulty in identifying such attacks and the possibility of false positives.

Why It Matters: The Indian government, represented by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, has acknowledged these concerns and confirmed an ongoing investigation. However, the minister described Apple’s threat notifications as “vague” and “estimations.”

Historically, Apple’s advice to users who receive such alerts has been to enable Lockdown mode, a security feature introduced in 2022 to guard against state-sponsored spyware attacks. Since the introduction of this feature, Apple has issued alerts to individuals in nearly 150 countries.

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Image: Shutterstock/ Ken stocker