9 of the opposition leaders from congress party allegedly made a complaint of being hacked by an anonymous state sponsored attack and received alerts from apple for the same.
This issue led to a war of words between IT cell head of BJP party, Amit Malviya and Congress Senior leader, P Chidambaram on Wednesday after he questioned the alerts received from Apple regarding unidentified State Sponsored.
Many notable figures including Shashi Tharoor, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra, AAP’s Raghav Chadha have reported that they did receive an alert email regarding this on their phones.
Image Source- India Today
Opposition LeaderP Chidambaram’s post on X
Posting on social media platform, X P Chidambaram state that there is no undeniable fact in stating that hundreds of opposition leaders received alerts from apple and he made an stark statement that no one will be interested in tracing the phones of opposition leaders and marked that the fingers are pointing towards the government authorities involvement for the same. However, he also included in his post that as of now it is only speculation and no firm assertions are made for the same allegations.
While retaliating to the allegations suspected by P Chidambaram, BJP IT cell head took to X and wrote that in 2011 Ex finance Minister, Pranab Mukharji’s offices was also bugged and during that time P Chidambaram was Home Minister and asked him dies that mean his ministry was the reason behind this.
According to various reports it was highlighted that Pranab Mukherjee had written to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh regarding the recovery of suspicious material from his office that might be implanted for an electronic device. He further goes on saying that Apple has issued advisory in 150 countries and it is clear from the mail that they don’t have any specific information about this, the alerts were sent just based on an estimated basis.
Image Source- india.com
Apple In Response To This Controversy
Apple has also issued a statement in response to this that the alerts do not attribute with any specific state sponsored attackers but there can be high chances of these being just a false alarm. The concerned political parties in India have assured that they will be cooperating in this entire situation and asked the Apple company to cooperate with them also efficiently.
Rahul Gandhi also targeted the ruling party during this issue and said that, “if you want my phone you can”, there is nothing which I am afraid of. These kinds of mischievous acts can’t shut them down or can drag away from speaking and working for reality.
Vaishnaw took to X and stated that much of the information provided by Apple on this issue seems completely vague without any substantial proof and added that he asked Apple to join in further investigation on this. Speaking to Bhopal media, he further mentioned that the investigation in this matter will be very technical and will be taken up under the supervision of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), India which is the nation’s national nodal agency in dealing with computer security incidents.
Any official statement from other dignitaries from the BJP party is yet to come in their favour. However this can be speculated easily that if this issue further escalates into a big controversy, there are high chances that this can be used by congress party favourably for them against the current ruling party, BJP in Lok Sabha elections that are on the roll the very next year.
