In late October, a week before the presidential election, Kamala Harris’ cybersecurity team called Apple looking for help. A spyware detection tool had flagged anomalies on two iPhones belonging to senior members of the vice president’s team, and staff were worried the devices had been hacked.
The Harris team’s ask was a simple one, sources familiar with the incident told Forbes. It wanted Apple to extract a “raw image” copy of the operating system from one of the devices to better assess what had happened to it.
Though the phone’s owner had consented to its examination, Apple declined to provide the image, sources said. The company did offer to provide iCloud backup information and some telemetry data linked to the device, but neither were of interest to the Harris campaign, which did not press the issue over fears of the issue becoming politicized. The phone continues to be investigated by iVerify, the company whose spyware detection tool first flagged the issues. Both Apple and the Harris campaign declined to comment on the matter. The FBI, which had been investigating the matter, declined to comment.