The German government is warning politicians and public figures that they were targeted by government-backed spyware, days after Apple began sending out notifications warning victims that their iPhones may have been hacked.
Germany’s federal cybersecurity office, known as the BSI, said in a note over the weekend that it had become aware that members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and other unnamed notable individuals, had received warnings from Apple that they may have been targeted by cyberattacks.
Per the Financial Times, German government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius said the government in Berlin was “taking the incident and the warning very seriously,” but he did not say who in the federal government had been targeted, including whether German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was among them.
Apple periodically sends out so-called threat notifications to people it thinks may have been targeted by spyware, which can steal messages, location data, and other sensitive information from their phones. This spyware often relies on zero-click exploits, which can hack individuals almost invisibly as they don’t require a victim to click on a link or open a file.
Apple does not attribute attacks to specific governments or say whether someone’s phone has actually been compromised. For that reason, the BSI said that anyone who receives an Apple threat notification “should therefore assume that their device may have been compromised.”
Others outside of Germany also received the recent threat alert from Apple. Radwan Mortada, a Beirut-based filmmaker, said in a post on X that he received a new threat notification warning that Apple had detected “another attack against your device,” after an earlier spyware attack targeted him in 2021.
It’s unclear who is behind this latest round of spyware attacks, or which government may have orchestrated the targeting. Per the notice received by Mortada, Apple said its latest batch of threat notifications went out to users in 99 countries.
The episode highlights again the murky business behind a growing number of attacks against members of civil society. Governments rarely build these tools themselves. Many buy them from private vendors, often called “mercenary spyware” makers, the best known being Israel’s NSO Group, which sells the controversial Pegasus spyware. Germany’s own central federal law agency, the BKA, reportedly bought access to Pegasus in 2019.
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