Apple experts coming to India to investigate warning message on politicians’ iPhone

Apple iPhone is the most popular smartphone model across the globe. Keeping camera, design, processor aside, one of the things about Apple iPhone that makes it stand out is the security. Apple invests huge to make iPhones the best in terms of security and recent notifications received by Indian politicians brought it to the limelight. For those who are unaware, a few known politicians across India received a warning message on their iPhone claiming that state-sponsored hackers are targeting their devices.

To investigate the situation, Apple is now sending a team of experts to delve deep into the issue. The Apple team consists of technical and cybersecurity experts and will visit India soon to further look into the issue, reliable sources told IANS on Friday.

The threat notification probe is currently being conducted by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). In October, Opposition MPs, including Shiv Sena’s (UBT) Priyanka Chaturvedi, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, Congress’ Pawan Khera and Shashi Tharoor, AAP’s Raghav Chadha, CPI(M)’s Sitaram Yechury and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said they received a notification from Apple stating that their devices were being targeted by state-sponsored attackers.

Apple had sent “threat notifications” to individuals whose accounts are in nearly 150 countries. The company had clarified that “it does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker”. Apple that it’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms.

“State-sponsored attackers are very well-funded and sophisticated, and their attacks evolve over time. Detecting such attacks relies on threat intelligence signals that are often imperfect and incomplete. It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected,” the tech giant had said in a statement.

Apple had said it was “unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications, as that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future”. (with inputs from IANS)