'Snoopgate': Apple says threat notifications may be false alarms, not attributable to specific state-sponsored attackers

State-sponsored attacker threat notifications involving Indian politicians, journalists and lawyers, are not attributable to any specific state-sponsored attacker, Apple exclusively told Firstpost.

Furthermore, Apple clarified, “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.”

As reliable and useful as Apple’s threat notifications are, Apple maintains, that it is “possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected.” And there is a very good reason for that.

Apple believes that if they are to provide information about what causes them to issue threat notifications, it may help state-sponsored attackers to adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future.

Apple also clarified, the state-sponsored-attackers threat notification has been sent to individuals in over 150 countries, since they enabled the feature with the launch of iOS 16 back in 2022, and not in the last couple of days as certain handles on social media are claiming it to be.

How it all started
Opposition party leaders including Congress’ Shashi Tharoor, Priyanka Chaturvedi of the Shiv Sena (UBT), AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi and Trinamool Congress’ Mahua Moitra posted screenshots of the message received on their phones which read, “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.”

Mahua Moitra shared a tweet containing screenshots of an alert sent by Apple, which carried the ominous title, “Your iPhone may be under the scrutiny of state-sponsored hackers.” Moitra also revealed that Priyanka Chaturvedi and three additional individuals belonging to the Opposition INDIA group had encountered identical warning messages on both their mobile phones and email accounts.

Following this several other Opposition leaders started sharing that Apple had sent them similar notifications.

Shashi Tharoor took to Twitter to express his thoughts on an email received from an Apple ID, threat-notifications@apple.com, which he personally verified for authenticity. He humorously remarked that it was reassuring to witness government officials with less workload keeping themselves occupied at the expense of taxpayers like himself. He concluded his tweet with a rhetorical question, hinting at the priorities of these officials.

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