BERLIN (The Thursday Times) — Germany has warned politicians and public figures that their iPhones may have been targeted by government-backed spyware, days after Apple began sending threat alerts to users in 99 countries.
The federal cybersecurity office, the BSI, said over the weekend that members of the Bundestag and other notable people had received the warnings from Apple. Anyone who gets one “should therefore assume that their device may have been compromised”, it said.
Government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius said Berlin was “taking the incident and the warning very seriously”. He did not say who in the federal government was affected, or whether Chancellor Friedrich Merz was among them.
It is not clear who is behind the attacks. Apple does not name governments in its alerts, and does not say whether a phone has actually been broken into. The 99-country figure comes from the text of a notice received by Radwan Mortada, a filmmaker based in Beirut, who said on X that Apple had detected “another attack against your device”.
Spyware of this kind can steal messages and location data, often through so-called zero-click attacks that need no click or download from the victim. Governments rarely build it themselves and usually buy it from private companies, the best known being Israel’s NSO Group, maker of Pegasus. Germany’s own federal police agency reportedly bought access to Pegasus in 2019.
South Asia has seen the same alert before. In 2023, Indian opposition politicians said Apple had warned them of state-sponsored attacks on their iPhones.
