According to The Washington Post, Apple has Apple’s government in India “very anCredit : Apple Indiagry” for alerting its recognised detractors.
According to The Washington Post, Indian officials that are affiliated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi have questioned Apple over the accuracy of its internal threat algorithms and are currently conducting an investigation into the security of its products. It would appear that officials targeted the company after it sent a warning in October to journalists and opposition lawmakers, stating that there was a possibility that state-sponsored hackers had taken control of their computers. From the perspective of the general public, Apple is being scrutinised for the security precautions it has implemented; nevertheless, according to the Post, government officials were more forthright about what they desired behind closed doors.
According to reports, they contacted the officials of the company in India in order to exert pressure on Apple to find a method to mitigate the political impact of its hacking warnings. The authorities also enlisted the assistance of an Apple security specialist in order to devise alternate reasons for the warnings that they might convey to the general public. The explanation that they are most likely to present is one that does not implicate the government as a potential perpetrator.
There was one thing that all of the journalists and politicians who wrote about Apple’s warnings on social media had in common: these individuals were all critical of the government that Modi was leading. An investigation into Gautam Adani, a longtime associate of Modi, was being conducted by Amnesty International, which analysed the phone of a specific journalist named Anand Mangnale. The organisation discovered that an adversary had installed the Pegasus spyware on the Apple device that Mangnale was using. Despite the fact that Apple did not directly state that the attacks were carried out by the Indian government, Pegasus, which was built by the Israeli business NSO Group, is primarily sold to governments and government agencies.
According to an article published by The Post, the dominant political party in India has neither confirmed or denied using Pegasus to spy on journalists and political opponents. However, this is not the first time that its critics have been infected with the Pegasus spyware. In the year 2021, an investigation that was conducted by a number of media and which brought the Pegasus project to light discovered malware on the mobile devices of individuals who had a history of opposing and criticising the administration of Modi.