The IDs of around one million iPhone and iPad users has been leaked online by a group on hackers associated with the ‘Anonymous’ movement of online political activists. The data was allegedly stolen from an FBI laptop, which if proved true, could be a major embarrassment to the US intelligence service.
The AntiSec group of hackers have released what they claim is a set of 1,000,001 unique device identifiers (UDIDs) for iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, which were stolen from the FBI.
The group also claims to have access to more than 12 million other IDs, which it has not released, as well as account holders’ personal information.
The personal information is said to include user names, device names, telephone numbers and addresses.
According to experts this information could be handed to spammers and potentially used to infect computers and steal credit card details.
The release also contains the device names and APNS tokens, which are key to getting push notifications onto devices.
AntiSec claim that the data is just a small part of a much large trove of personal information, which includes the UDIDs of 12,000,000 devices, and “full names, cell numbers, addresses, zipcodes, etc” for a smaller subset of them.
In a statement published online the group said that it had published the information to bring attention to the FBI apparently using the details to track Americans.
The group explain why they’ve leaked the data, claiming that that the “FBI is using your device info for a tracking people project”.
While the personal information has not been released, the hackers claim that a significant number of users will be able to search for their device, using their Apple device ID.
The statement said that the FBI laptop “was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java. During the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder.”
AntiSec, or the ‘Anti Security Movement’, is opposed to the computer security industry.
Hacking is a worldwide problem and has become much more visible in the last couple of years, because of the rise of so-called ‘hacktivism’. This mixture of hacking and activism is designed to discredit and embarrass large scale organisations.
AntiSec said it will not provide further statements until a photo of a writer at a US-based gossip website is featured on the site’s front page dressed in a tutu. Adrian Chen is a writer at Gawker who has criticismed hacking groups in the past.
The AntiSec message (via Pastebin) is here:
http://pastebin.com/nfVT7b0Z
