Apple: Company Never Provided iOS IDs To 'Any' Organization
Posted 09/05/2012 at 1:54pm
| by Matt Clark
Still worried your Apple device's UDID, and subsequently your personal information, floating around on a hacker group's hard drive? Well, there's no denying Antisec have managed to snatch up a ton of device codes, but exactly how the identifying tokens were lifted is a bit of a mystery. Now, both the FBI and Apple are deying any and all knowledge.
On Monday night, someone or some group claiming to represent Antisec, posted a file containing over a million Apple UDID codes. Each code is unique to an Apple device, and therefore could potentially link back to personally identifiable information.
The hackers claimed to have purloined the codes via a security exploit in an FBI supervisor's laptop. The Federal Bureau of Investigation denied the allegations yesterday, stating there was no evidence of a data breach on an FBI laptop. Moreover, the agency claimed it has never "sought or obtained" Apple UDID information.
Antisec, posting from the @AnonymousIRC Twitter account, seemed to shrug off the FBI denials. "Also, before you deny too much: Remember we're sitting on 3TB of additional data. We have not even started," reads one Tweet.
Assuming the UDID numbers were not taken from an FBI laptop, where did they come from? Obviously, everyone's waited for Cupertino to comment on the alleged data breach, and unsurprisingly, the company denies any knowledge.
“The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization," Apple's Natalie Kerris told AllThingsD. "Additionally, with iOS 6 we introduced a new set of APIs meant to replace the use of the UDID, and will soon be banning the use of UDID."
So -- who can we believe, here? Antisec clearly has acquired over a million UDID numbers, and that didn't just happen by happenstance. The group claims to have some 12 million UDID codes in total.
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