Opposition leaders claim they received alerts from Apple about ‘state-sponsored attacks’ on their phones

Apple India has sent a warning notification to several iPhone users apprising them that they could be a likely target of a state-sponsored attack trying to “remotely compromise” the device associated with their mail id.

Most of these users are leaders of political parties of the opposition such as Trinamool Congress Party’s Mohua Moitra, Shiv Sena’s Priyanka Chaturvedi, Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, Indian National Congress’ Pawan Khera and others. Some journalists also put out posts of X (formerly Twitter) that Apple had sent them notifications warning them of the probable attack attempt on their device.

According to Apple, users targetted by such attacks are “individually targeted because of who they are or what they do”, claimed the alert message sent by Apple to the affected users. The company could not be immediately reached for a comment.

“Unlike traditional cybercriminals, state-sponsored attackers apply exceptional resources to target a very small number of specific individuals and their devices, which makes these attacks much harder to detect and prevent,” a blogpost from Apple explaining how such attack work says.

This is second time that Apple has sent out such notifications warning users of a possible state-sponsored attack on them.

In 2021, both Apple and Google had sent out warning notifications to users globally, including in India, cautioning them that their devices may have been remotely comprised due to an attack made by Pegasus, a spyware manufactured by Israeli company NSO.

Though India had later formed a panel to look into these allegations, the expert panel concluded that there was no evidence of the spyware being state sponsored.