Parliamentary Panel May Grill Apple Officials Over 'State-Sponsored Attackers' Alert Row

A parliamentary panel on information technology is reportedly set to summon Apple officials over the iPhone notifications row.

This comes after several opposition party leaders and MPs claimed on Tuesday that they had received warnings from Apple, suggesting that their iPhones could have been the targets of state-sponsored attacks.

The issue will be raised in the next meeting of the parliamentary standing committee on IT, NDTV reported citing sources.

According to the report, the Opposition MPs are also likely to ask questions during the meeting.

Following political controversy over the Apple iPhone alerts, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday dismissed the concerns raised by the Opposition regarding the hacking of iPhones.

"It is election season and people will pull all sorts of things from a hat," he said in an interview with NDTV.

"Many people have got this notification in many countries," Chandrasekhar said, but he echoed IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, in affirming the necessity for a thorough investigation.

Several MPs from the opposition ranks, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi, and the Aam Aadmi Party's Raghav Chadha, shared screenshots of the messages and emails that they had recieved from Apple on the platform X, previously known as Twitter.

The Centre has said it expects Apple to clarify several matters, including whether its devices were secure and why these "threat notifications" were sent to people in over 150 countries.

In response to the hacking alert claims, Apple stated on Tuesday that it "does not attribute the notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker".

The iPhone manufacturer also said "it is possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms".