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Hacker group releases 1 million Apple UDIDs stolen from FBI

Hacker group releases 1 million Apple UDIDs stolen from FBI

By Gaurav Shukla | Updated: 4 September 2012 15:52 IST

A hacking group named AntiSec has allegedly released more than 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs), which they claim to have taken by hacking the laptop of a FBI officer.

A UDID is a 40-character code unique to each iOS device, typically used by developers to register devices for testing their apps.

The group states that they have 12 million UDIDs, however they have only released the data for one million UDIDs in public. They noted in a statement on website Pastebin, these UDIDs were accompanied by user names, device names, notification tokens, cell phone numbers and addresses, although they have stripped the personal details from the publicly available information.

Here is how the hacker group obtained the Apple UDIDs in their own words:

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

If the leaked data was indeed obtained from a FBI computer, one can't help but wonder how FBI obtained this data, and towards what end? Neither FBI nor Apple have released a statement at the time of filing this report on the authenticity of these leaks.

NDTV Gadgets was not able to independently verify the authenticity of these UDIDs.

(Edited by Kunal Dua)

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