IT Minister Vaishnaw said that India is looking into complaints from opposition politicians about iPhone hacking

Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India’s cyber security agency is looking into claims of mobile phone hacking made by prominent opposition leaders who claimed to have received warning messages from Apple.

According to an article on Thursday, Vaishnaw said that “Apple confirmed it has received the notice for investigation” and that “CERT-In, the computer emergency response team based in New Delhi, had started the probe.”

According to two federal home ministry officials and Vaishnaw’s political adviser, all of the lawmakers’ worries about cyber security are being closely examined.

Apple did not immediately respond to inquiries on the probe.

After some lawmakers posted screenshots of a notification quoting the iPhone manufacturer saying: “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID” on social media, Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government this week of attempting to hack into the phones of opposition politicians.

A top government minister for Modi said that he had got the same notice on his phone.

“It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected,” Apple said, declining to link the threat notifications to “any specific state-sponsored attacker.”

disclosures surfaced in 2021 that the Indian government had spied on several journalists, activists, and politicians, including Gandhi, using Pegasus spyware, manufactured in Israel. These disclosures shocked the country.

When asked whether India or any of its state agencies had bought Pegasus spyware for monitoring, the government has refused to respond.