India Asked Apple To Soften Impact Of iPhone Hack Warning: Report (Photo by Hussam Abd on Unsplash)

In October, several opposition leaders and journalists in the country claimed that they received Apple’s warning message about “state-sponsored attackers” targeting their iPhones. Leaders including Mahua Moitra, Pawan Khera, and Shashi Tharoor also shared screenshots of the text received from Apple. The Washington Post reported that this prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi”s administration to quickly demand Apple soften its message.

The Washington Post, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported that India representatives of Apple were called by senior officials in the PM Modi administration. The officials demanded Apple help soften the political impact of the warnings. The officials have also summoned an Apple security expert from abroad to a meeting in New Delhi. As per the report, government representatives urged the Apple official in this meeting to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to iPhone users.

The Apple official reportedly stood by the company’s warnings. “But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company’s headquarters, in Cupertino,” claimed the report. On October 31, opposition leaders severely criticised the central government while sharing a screenshot of the alert they received on their iPhones. The warning message from Apple via text message and e-mail was titled “ALERT: State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone.” However, the tech giant later clarified that it does not attribute the threat notification to any specific state-sponsored attacker. In the support page, Apple says that the users are individually targeted “because of who they are or what they do.” Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the central government would investigate the matter and also directed Apple to join the probe.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International and the Washington Post conducted a joint investigation and said in their report that the Indian government has recently targeted high-profile journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Anand Mangnale with Pegasus spyware. The Amnesty International’s Security Lab also found traces of Pegasus spyware activity on phones owned by Anand Mangnale and Siddharth Varadarajan.

“Adani is the government and the government is Adani,” Moitra said. “It is our greatest misfortune that we are governed by a bunch of peeping Toms.”

Here is @washingtonpost’s article on India phone hacking https://t.co/EXqpf4Hs4z

— Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) December 28, 2023

Trinamool Congress member Mahua Moitra, who was expelled from parliament recently, also shared the Washington Post report through her X handle on December 28. “It is our greatest misfortune that we are governed by a bunch of peeping Toms,” wrote the TMC leader while sharing the report.