According to a report from NBC News, last week’s Anonymous hack, which was reported at the time to have affected one million Apple UDIDs obtained from the FBI, was not actually a hack on the FBI at all. So what’s really going on?
Paul DeHart, CEO of the Blue Toad publishing company, has claimed that his technicians found a 98 per cent correlation between its own data and the AntiSec data released in last week’s incident. According to the NBC report, it represents a “100 per cent confidence level” that it was Blue Toad’s data Anonymous breached and leaked.
Anonymous, or at least the group using the name for this particular operation, claimed that the one million UDIDs were part of a cache of 12 million pulled from an FBI agent’s laptop. The FBI, however, did not acknowledge any evidence that a compromise had occurred:
“The FBI is aware of published reports alleging that an FBI laptop was compromised and private data regarding Apple UDIDs was exposed. At this time, there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.”
Apple also washed its hands of the whole ordeal.
While there’s not much you can do about your UDID being out there, don’t be too worried if your device was a part of the leak. The UDID and its associated information — especially if they were taken from a single publishing company — are just a small cross section of your online life. Super confidential information such as passwords (hashed or unhashed) or credit card information were not taken.
It’s still troubling that user data was hacked, but we can feel a little better knowing that the FBI doesn’t have a giant repository of mobile phone data (as far as we know) and that Apple is doing away with most UDID functions in iOS 6. [NBC via Techmeme]