Apple responds on alerts to opposition MPs. Read full statement

Apple on Tuesday issued a statement after at least seven opposition leaders claimed they received an email from the technology giant warning them about the ‘state-sponsored’ attackers that were potentially remotely trying to compromise the iPhones associated with their IDs.

“Apple 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", the statement read.

“It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected. We are unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications, as that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future”, the Apple statement added.

The opposition leaders including Congress’s Shashi Tharoor and Pawan Khera, Shiv Sena’s Priyanka Chaturvedi, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra, and Aam Aadmi Party’s Raghav Chadha had flagged receiving such emails from the iPhone maker.

The alerts from Apple have come to light a year after a Supreme Court-appointed experts committee had found inconclusive evidence of the presence of Pegasus spyware in the 29 phones it analysed.

The panel had said the government did not cooperate with its probe while recommending new laws and measures to protect citizens from illegal surveillance and cyber attacks. The panel found some malware in five of the phones but there was nothing conclusive to show it was Pegasus.