FBI Computer Breached, Hacker Group Says They Have 12 Million Apple IDs

Well this news, if true, sucks on two levels with the first being that there are now 12 million comprised Apple IDs and the second being – what the hell was the FBI doing with that information in the first place.

The reported breach was done by the hacking group AntiSec, which is reported to have ties with hacktivist group Anonymous, and they claim that they managed to breach an FBI laptop that was home to some 12 million IDs belonging to Apple iPhone and iPad users.

While the FBI is obviously declining to make any comments on the report Peter Kruze, a security specialist with CSIS Security Group out of Denmark, has said the leak is real and has been able to confirm three of his own devices in the data.

This is blowing up all over the Internet with many tech writers referring to this as one of the worst privacy disaster yet and more than few comments on Twitter wondering why the FBI had that information in the first place.

The following is a part of the statement posted by the hackers:

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.

via The Next Web

If you are concerned about whether or not you might be in the list the team at The Next Web have put together a way for you to check but I keep coming back to the real question here: what the hell was the FBI doing with this list, why did they need it, and how did t hey get it?

This news should be raising the hairs on everyone’s neck.

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Tags: Anonymous, AntiSec, Apple, FBI, hacked

About the Author

Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).