In the latest development in the Apple row, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) is considering summoning Apple officials during an upcoming meeting in order to recent alerts on state-sponsored attacks sent to opposition leaders and other prominent personalities in India on their iPhones, according to news agency ANI.Parliamentary Standing Committee to summon Apple officialsThe panels secretariat has expressed deep concern and is treating the matter with the utmost seriousness, an official said.Notably, a huge controversy sparked on Tuesday when several Opposition leaders said they received notifications from Apple on state-sponsored attackers trying to compromise their iPhones and accused the government of hacking. The government denied the charges and said a thorough investigation would be carried out into the matter.Those who received such notifications included Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, party leaders Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera, KC Venugopal, Supriya Shrinate, TS Singhdeo and Bhupinder Singh Hooda Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra, CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav.Meanwhile, Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, Aam Aadmi Partys (AAP) Raghav Chadha, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi and some aides of Congress MP Rahul Gandhi also received the message from Apple.What did Apple say on this rowAmid a rise in this tension, Apple released a statement, saying it did not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker.”It further added that the notifications may be false alarms.”Probing into this matter, the government said that Apple had issued an advisory in nearly 150 countries and the alerts were vague in nature.Centres stance...IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw rejected the oppositions attack on the government, saying the compulsive critics were indulging in the politics of distraction as they could not tolerate the countrys progress under Prime Minister Narendra Modis leadership. He, however, assured the government will investigate to get to the bottom of these notifications.”Vaishnaw also said the matter was a very technical kind of investigation,” and would be taken up by Cert-In, the national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents.
