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IT parliamentary committee must take up Apple matter: Karti Chidambaram
Amidst the ensuing political furore, Union minister of electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the government would investigate this matter and sought Apple’s cooperation for the same
Congress MP Karti P Chidambaram has written to the parliamentary committee chairperson to look into the threat notifications that were sent by Apple company to almost two dozen Opposition MPs, journalists and researchers.
Speaking to HT, Chidambaram, who is a member of the parliamentary standing committee on communications and information technology, said, “I am writing to parliamentary committee chairperson Prataprao Jadhav to call all the affected parties and the company [Apple] representatives. This is a very important issue. How can they [the government] claim that it is an ‘algorithmic malfunction’ when it affects only Opposition members?”
Simultaneously, a member from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has told HT that the committee has not yet decided whether or not to call Apple representatives.
The government will decide in the next meeting which is expected to take place after Diwali festival, said the leader.
At least nine Opposition leaders said on Tuesday that they were sent emails by Apple warning them of hacking attempts by unidentified “state-sponsored” attackers, prompting the government to ask the American tech company to share more details amid a political row.
On Monday night, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera and Supriya Shrinate; Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, Shiv Sena’s Priyanka Chaturvedi, Sitaram Yechury from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra, and Raghav Chadha from the Aam Aadmi Party, were among the politicians who purportedly got emails from the Apple.
Online publication The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan, resident editor of Deccan Chronicle Sriram Karri, Hyderabad-based independent journalist Revathi Pogadadanda, and Observer Research Foundation’s Samir Saran also received threat notifications warning them that a state-sponsored actor was trying to compromise their phones.
Amidst the ensuing political furore, Union minister of electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the government would investigate this matter and sought Apple’s cooperation for the same. At the same time, Apple released a statement saying that it was not attributing the attack to any “specific” state actor.
“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 said in a statement.
Vaishnaw’s announcement came after the Opposition leaders alleged that the government was spying on them. Vaishnaw dismissed the allegation.
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 IT parliamentary committee last convened on Monday on combating online financial frauds. HT has learnt that the members were left largely unimpressed with the steps taken by the ministries to protect citizens from such frauds and with the time taken to resolve complaints.
To be sure, the advisory has been sent by Apple to people in 150 countries since this notification system was introduced in November 2021, not just last night. Apple has routinely alerted users and rushed emergency software patches after hackers — often from sophisticated cyber mercenary groups — exploit previously undiscovered software flaws known as zero-days.
