‘Apple will cooperate in probe’: IT Secretary as India launches probe in threat notification row

India has launched a probe into the contentious Apple threat notification issue, IT Secretary S Krishnan said Thursday, adding that Apple would cooperate in the investigation.

Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In)— India’s nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents— has started the probe.

Krishnan was speaking on the sidelines of an event related to the Meity-NSF research collaboration Thursday.
“They (Apple) will cooperate in this probe,” he said.

A major controversy rocked India earlier this week after several Opposition leaders received an alert from Apple about some “state-sponsored” attackers “trying to remotely compromise” the device they are using.

KC Venugopal, Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera, Sitaram Yechury, Akhilesh Yadav, Priyanka Chaturvedi and “people in Rahul Gandhi’s office” were among those who received alerts from Apple.

Apple later in a brief statement said that it does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker.

“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 company said in a statement.

The tech giant further said that they are unable to provide information about what causes them to issue threat notifications, as that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future.

“The notification received by them as per media reports mentions ‘state-sponsored attacks’ on their devices.

However much of the information by Apple on this issue seems vague and non-specific in nature. Apple states these notifications may be based on information that is ‘incomplete or imperfect’. It also states that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms or some attacks are not detected,” Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics and Information Technology, posted on X.