Apple Has Joined Centre's Investigation Over Alerts Regarding State-Sponsored Attacks: Report

The development comes as the Opposition is accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government of snooping on Opposition leaders and critics.?

Earlier this week, several politicians, journalists, and other public figures had received alerts on their Apple devices, such as iPhones, that they could be subjected to state-sponsored attacks. While the Opposition attacked the Centre over the alerts, Apple later said that such alerts were sent to users in 150 countries.

While the Centre downplayed the Apple's alerts, its cyber-security wing Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has started an investigation.?

The Indian Express has reported that Apple joined the CERT-In's investigation on Thursday.?

The Express reported that the Centre has sent a notice to Apple to seek an explanation on the alerts.?

Moreover, the Centre has also floated an enquiry to assess whether Apple's devices are safe to use and the government's investigation is focused on "determining if the Apple products are secure and safe and can be trusted to protect the privacy of the consumers", according to The Express.?

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar told The Express, "The government is determined to get to the bottom of this. Our investigation is focused on determining if Apple products are secure and safe and can be trusted to protect the privacy of the consumers. If Apple devices are safe… we want to know what those ‘threat notification messages’ were. We have asked them to explain. If their devices are secure and safe, they should be transparent and disclose the vulnerabilities to their consumers and the government."

Among those who said they received the alerts from Apple were Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, Observer Research Foundation (ORF) President Samir Saran, and journalists Siddharth Varadarajan, Sriram Karri, and Revathi. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also said that fellow party leaders KV Venugopal and Pawan Khera also received the alerts.?

In a statement after the alerts were made public by the users, Apple said it could not ascertain which state-actor was behind the suspected attacks and some of the attacks could also be false alarms.

"Apple does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker...It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected," said Apple in a statement, according to CNBCTV 18.