Centre rejects Amnesty report that claimed use of Pegasus to target two Indian journalists
It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected, said the Union minister
Following Amnesty International’s damning report about iPhones of two Indian journalists being targeted with Israeli surveillance spyware Pegasus, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar has termed the findings “half facts, fully embellished”.
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Chandrasekhar refuted the claims saying that the report was “terrible story telling”. He said his response and that of the ministry has been consistent and clear that “it is for Apple to explain if their devices are vulnerable and what triggered these notifications”. “Apple was asked to join the enquiry with @IndianCERT and meetings have been held and enquiry is ongoing. Those are the facts (sic),” he wrote.
‘Creative imagination’
“Apple does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker. 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,” he said.
“It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected. We are unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications, as that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future,” he tweeted.
“Left out of the story is Apple’s response on Oct 31-day of threat notifications,” said the minister on the social media platform. “Rest of story is creative imagination and clickbaiting at work masquerading as journalism,” he alleged.
Two journos targeted
As per a joint probe by Amnesty International’s Security Lab and The Washington Post, at least two senior Indian journalists were recently targeted with Pegasus spyware.
According to the report, the two journalists are The Wire’s founding-editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, and Anand Mangnale, the South Asia editor at The Organised Crime and Corruption Report Project. The latest identified case was reported in October this year, the report said.
The spyware was reportedly detected after the phones of the two journalists were tested by the security lab. The journalists had given their iPhones to Amnesty for testing after they received an alert from Apple that their devices were being targeted by “state-sponsored hacking” in October.
