Germany warns politicians their iPhones may be hacked

The German government has expressed serious concern about the iPhones of officials and lawmakers being compromised by spyware.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security issued an urgent notice over the weekend advising government figures that if they have received a notification from Apple in recent days, they should assume their device is no longer secure. Affected individuals started receiving notifications from Apple on Thursday, the government said.

“The Federal Government is taking the incident and the warning very seriously,” Stefan Kornelius, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesman, said on Monday.

“It must be assumed that devices may have been compromised,” he added. “The authorities are now working flat out to investigate the circumstances of the incident, as well as to inform and support those affected.”

Kornelius declined to say whether the chancellor was among those hit. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The attack exploits a so-called “zero-click” vulnerability, meaning that the targeted phones were infected without their owners having to do anything, such as clicking on a malicious link or opening a malicious file to become compromised.

Knowledge of their targets’ phone numbers was all that the hackers needed to carry out the attack.

No conclusions have yet been drawn about who might be responsible for the hack, but security officials believe it is almost certainly state backed.

The hacking spyware in question — which has also not been named — is “commercially developed” and has been used by several different governments in the past, officials said.

The best-known example of such software is Pegasus, developed by the Israeli company NSO. It allows hackers to read messages, even those sent via encrypted apps, as well as access contacts, calendars, phone location data and photos and documents. Infected phones can also be turned into listening devices by activating their microphones.

German MPs and government officials are valuable targets for hostile intelligence services.

Julia Klöckner, the president of the German parliament, was the highest-profile of several dozen German lawmakers compromised this spring by a phishing campaign that specifically targeted users of the encrypted messaging app Signal.

Russian hacking groups, linked to the country’s intelligence services, have been the most active in seeking to gain access to German politicians’ secrets.

The group known as APT 28 or “Fancy Bear”, controlled by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, was behind a 2022 hack into Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

The same group also perpetrated the 2015 hack on the German parliament, which saw about 16 gigabytes of data exfiltrated from computers used by senior members of all German political parties.

The German government officially blamed Russia for the attack in 2020, lodging a formal complaint with Moscow’s ambassador.

A secure communications network used by German ministries known as the Berlin-Bonn information network was also compromised by Russian hackers, linked to the FSB, in 2016. Classified documents concerning the war in Ukraine and then-ongoing Brexit negotiations were among those accessed.