Apple Revamps Threat Notification Policy, Drops The Term ‘State-Sponsored’

In a major move, big tech major Apple has dropped the word “state-sponsored” from its threat notification policy. 

In an update posted on its support page on April 10, Apple informed the users of the impending change. The change also became apparent as the Cupertino-based company reportedly warned its users in India and 91 other countries on April 11 of a “mercenary spyware attack”. 

The new phrase replaced the term “state-sponsored” used in Apple’s previous alerts to refer to such malware attacks.

“According to public reporting…, individually targeted attacks of such exceptional cost and complexity have historically been associated with state actors… Though deployed against a very small number of individuals – often journalists, activists, politicians and diplomats – mercenary spyware attacks are ongoing and global,” said Apple on its support page.

This follows the company’s standoff with the Indian government last year after the tech major issued a series of alerts to opposition leaders and warned them of “state-sponsored” attacks. 

A source told Reuters that the removal of the term followed repeated pressure from the Indian government on linking such breaches to state actors. As per the report, the iPhone maker also held “extensive talks” with Indian officials before releasing the latest set of alerts.

The story harks back to October last year when several opposition leaders claimed they received an alert from Apple warning them of state-sponsored attackers trying to “remotely compromise” their iPhones and alleged hacking by the government.

The impacted leaders included Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress’ Shashi Tharoor, Shiv Sena’s (UBT faction) Priyanka Chaturvedi, AAP’s Raghav Chadha, Sitaram Yechury of Communist Party of India (Marxist), among others.

Subsequently, the Centre refuted the allegations of snooping and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) sent a notice to Apple concerning the controversial threat notifications.

Last month, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the Centre received ambiguous responses from Apple in connection with the questions related to the notifications. 

“In my humble opinion, this is not something that any proprietary platform will completely concede whether they have vulnerabilities in their platform. There’s an instinct in any platform to deny that vulnerability exists… We are asking a clear question, is your phone vulnerable? The answer to that is not unambiguous,” Chandrasekhar said.

Interestingly, the smartphone maker claims to have sent such threat notifications to its users in nearly 150 countries since the feature was enabled in late 2021.