New Delhi: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) is considering summoning Apple officials during an upcoming meeting to address recent alerts on “state-sponsored attacks” sent to Opposition leaders and other public figures in the country on their iPhones, news agency ANI reported, citing an official of the committee secretariat.
The committee’s secretariat has expressed ‘deep concern’ and is treating the matter with the ‘utmost seriousness’,” the official said.
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A controversy erupted on Tuesday when several Opposition leaders said they received notifications from Apple on “state-sponsored attackers” trying to compromise their iPhones and accused the government of hacking. The government denied the charges and said a thorough investigation would be carried out into the matter.
Those who received such notifications included Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, party leaders Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera, KC Venugopal, Supriya Shrinate, TS Singhdeo and Bhupinder Singh Hooda; Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra, CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav.
Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Raghav Chadha, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi and some aides of Congress MP Rahul Gandhi also received the message from Apple.
Some others who received similar alerts included think-tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF) president Samir Saran, an OSD of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan.
As the controversy gathered momentum, Apple, in a statement, said that it “did not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker”. It further added that “the notifications may be false alarms”.
The government, while asserting that it was concerned and had ordered a probe into the incident, added that Apple had issued an advisory in nearly 150 countries and the alerts were “vague” in nature.
IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw rejected the opposition’s attack on the government, saying the “compulsive critics” were indulging in the politics of “distraction” as they could not tolerate the country’s progress under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. He, however, assured the government “will investigate to get to the bottom of these notifications”.
Vaishnaw also said the matter was a very “technical kind of investigation”, and will be taken up by Cert-In, the national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents.
