New Delhi: Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Thursday lambasted a US daily’s report that claimed Indian authorities had asked Apple to help soften the political impact of the latter’s hacking alert, saying the newspaper had omitted the technology company’s response that the notification could be a case of “false alarm”. The BJP MP said the report was “half facts, fully embellished”.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar said it was for Apple to explain if their mobile phones were vulnerable and what triggered the alert. He said Apple had been asked to join a probe by the authorities over the alerts and several meetings had been held.
“Those are the facts. Rest of the story is creative imagination & clickbaiting at work masquerading as journalism,” he wrote on X.
In October, several Opposition politicians received alerts that state-sponsored hackers might have hacked their mobile phones.
After the alert triggered a giant controversy in India, Apple said in a statement that the company didn’t attribute 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. 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,” it had said.
Also read: Govt demanded Apple soften political impact of iPhone hack warnings: Report
The government later ordered a probe into the notifications.
Washington Post, a leading American daily, claimed on Thursday that the BJP government had asked Apple to soften the political impact.
Government officials allegedly exerted pressure on Apple to downplay the political impact of the warnings, the newspaper said citing three unidentified sources. They even allegedly summoned an Apple security expert to a meeting in New Delhi, urging them to provide alternative explanations for the warnings to the users.
Apple’s India representatives were called by administration officials who asked the company to help ‘soften’ the political impact of the warnings, the daily had claimed, citing sources.
“The visiting Apple official stood by the company’s warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government’s effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company’s headquarters,” the report claimed.
