Key facts
- Germany's BSI said Bundestag members and other unnamed notable individuals received Apple warnings they may have been targeted.
- Government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius said Berlin was taking the incident and the warning very seriously, per the Financial Times.
- Apple does not attribute attacks to governments or say whether a phone was actually compromised, the BSI noted.
- Filmmaker Radwan Mortada said on X that he received a new Apple threat notification after an earlier 2021 attack.
Germany's federal cybersecurity office, known as the BSI, said in a note over a weekend 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.
German government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius said Berlin was taking the incident and the warning very seriously, according to the Financial Times. He did not say who in the federal government had been targeted, including whether Chancellor Friedrich Merz was among them.
Apple periodically sends threat notifications to people it believes may have been targeted by spyware, which can take messages, location data and other sensitive information from phones. Such spyware often relies on zero-click exploits, which can compromise a device almost invisibly because the victim does not have to click a link or open a file.
Apple does not attribute attacks to specific governments or say whether a phone was actually compromised. The BSI said anyone who receives an Apple threat notification should assume that their device may have been compromised.
People outside Germany also received the alert. 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 his device, after an earlier spyware attack targeted him in 2021. Apple said in the notice received by Mortada that its latest batch of threat notifications went out to users in 99 countries.
It is unclear who is behind the latest round of attacks or which government may have orchestrated the targeting. Governments rarely build such tools themselves and often buy them from private vendors, the best known being Israel's NSO Group, which sells the Pegasus spyware. Germany's BKA federal criminal police office reportedly bought access to Pegasus in 2019.