Apple warned at least three Turkish ministers of spyware targeting, Middle East Eye reports
The alerts went out in August, in a batch Middle East Eye says reached users in 110 countries. Ankara says the attempts failed — an assessment no one outside the Turkish government has tested.
Middle East Eye reported on 8 September that Apple sent mercenary-spyware threat notifications to phones belonging to at least three Turkish government ministers, citing sources familiar with the matter. The alerts were part of a batch Apple sent last month to users in 110 countries, Turkey among them, according to MEE’s account; the notification event is therefore August, and only the identification of who was in it is new. Neither the spyware vendor nor the product is named. MEE states explicitly that it is not clear what tool was used, noting that several companies sell comparable capability, and the 2021 Forbidden Stories investigation — which with 16 media partners documented more than 50,000 phone numbers selected as potential targets by government clients since 2016 — appears in the piece as precedent, not as this year’s attribution.
An unnamed Turkish official told MEE that authorities believe the hacking attempts were unsuccessful, declined to name the ministers, and said they had been using hardened handsets and specially encrypted applications. After the Apple notification, according to the same account, Turkey’s newly established Presidency of Cyber Security examined the phones, replaced them and added further safeguards — the first operational task publicly attributed to that body. There is no Apple statement, no named Turkish official, and no forensic report from Citizen Lab, Amnesty’s Security Lab or Access Now attached to the case. The floor figure of three ministers is a floor, not a count.
Assessment: Read the sourcing structure before the substance. There are two anonymous layers here — MEE’s sources for the fact of notification, one unnamed official for the reassurance — and the weakest element is the one most likely to be quoted onward: a government assessing that attacks on its own ministers failed. That claim is unverifiable by design and self-serving by position. It either survives independent forensics or it does not. Note also the symmetry the region now produces: in September 2025 Israeli security officials said attempts against their officials' phones had risen since the June war with Iran and that none had succeeded. Both states claim targeting; both claim zero compromise. Neither has shown the work.