Centre’s cyber team CERT-In will probe Opposition’s ‘hacking’ charge
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New Delhi: IT Ministry sources said an emergency response team will enquire the Opposition leaders’ claim of having received alerts on their iPhones warning of state-sponsored attackers trying to hack their devices.
The online safety agency CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team), which responds to cyber security threats, will look into the controversy.
Several opposition leaders including Mahua Moitra, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Raghav Chadha, Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera, and Sitaram Yechury on Tuesday reportedly received ‘Apple alerts’.
As the controversy roiled, Apple responded saying ‘does not attribute the notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker’, adding ‘it is possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms.’
Opposition MPs including TMC’s Mahua Moitra and MP John Brittas of the CPI(M) demanded a meeting of the parliamentary standing committee for IT to probe the matter.
John Brittas shot off a letter to Prataprao Jadhav, chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, calling for an urgent meeting of the committee.
Rejecting Opposition leaders’ claims, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Apple had issued alerts in 150 countries which could be ‘false alarms’ as they were based on ‘incomplete and often inaccurate data’.