Expect Apple to clarify if its devices are secure: MoS IT

PTI, Oct 31, 2023, 5:19 PM IST

New Delhi: The government expects Apple to clarify if its devices are secure and why ‘threat notifications’ were sent to people in over 150 countries, given the company’s repeated claims about its products being designed for privacy, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Tuesday.

The government will investigate the threat notifications and also Apple’s claims of being secure and privacy-compliant devices, the Minister of State for IT said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“After today’s ‘threat notifications’ being received by many people, including MPs, and those in geopolitics, we expect Apple to clarify the following…if its devices are secure, why these ‘threat notifications’ are sent to people in over 150 countries,” the minister wrote.

Apple has repeatedly claimed their products are designed for privacy, he added.

The government on Tuesday ordered an investigation after Opposition MPs claimed that they received warnings of attempts being made by state-sponsored attackers to steal information from their iPhones. The probe will be conducted by Cert-In.

Several Opposition leaders on Tuesday claimed they had received an alert from Apple warning them of “state-sponsored attackers trying to remotely compromise” their iPhones and posted purported screenshots of the message on their X handles.

Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, Trinamool Congress’ Mahua Moitra, Aam Aadmi Party’s Raghav Chadha, Congress’ Shashi Tharoor and his party’s media and publicity department head Pawan Khera shared the message from Apple on X.

CPI(M)general secretary Sitaram Yechury also received a similar message, sources in the party had said.

As the political row erupted over the issue, iPhone maker Apple Inc said it does not attribute threat notifications, such as the ones received by some MPs belonging to Opposition parties, to any specific state-sponsored attackers and that it cannot provide information on what causes such warnings.