Lukas van der Merwe, Cybercom.Africa

In February 2025, Apple pulled its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system from the UK. It didn’t have much choice – the UK government had ordered Apple to enable access to encrypted data. However, because ADP operates as an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) system, Apple is unable to access data without the user’s encryption key. Circumventing it would require adding a backdoor.

Backdoors are ways to sidestep protections. Criminals install malicious backdoors to give them access to systems.