FBI Denies It Held iPhone UDIDs Stolen By AntiSec

judgecorp writes "The FBI has denied the UDID codes released yesterday came from an agent's laptop, as claimed by the AntiSec hacker group. The FBI says it does not hold such data, and the attack never happened. However, the agent named by AntiSec is real, and some of the published UDID codes have been found to be genuine. So where did they come from?"

Comments

So where did they come from?

[fustakrakich]

The FBI... What, does anybody expect them to admit it?

Re:So where did they come from?

[Sarten-X]

On the other hand, finding the names of agents is pretty easy, and dropping one makes for a much juicier story than "AntiSec managed to get a UDID-sniffing trojan into the app store".

In the absence of any further evidence, I must assume that everybody's lying. The real story is that the UDIDs were harvested wirelessly using petahertz radio scanners mounted on the invisible black helicopters flown by the lizard aliens who, due to their shared ancestry with birds, make excellent pilots, even in aircraft that are based on Martian stealth technology (which is why we're giving the Martians our nuclear-powered cars now).

Re:So where did they come from?

[falcon5768]

Only people foolish enough to think antisec actually cares about being truthful would think that. Lets face the facts here

12 million is a piss in the pond in terms of iOS UDID codes. Its less than half the iPhones sold LAST QUARTER. If the FBI was realistically trying to build a database of them, there is no way at this point they would ONLY have 12 Million.

12 million is more easily explained by being leaked from a developer, as up until half a year ago, developers were using the code to identify individual iPhones for various reasons like automatic sign-in to certain services like some of the multiplayer game services. Apple banned them from using it though half a year ago so at this point there was no reason to keep.

The data it's self was incomplete. Some had legit names and addresses while most were just a ID code. If this was from a official source then there would have been a lot more data on most of these. On the otherhand if it was stolen from a developer who let users opt out of giving their information but used the code for autologin purposes, then there would be clear reason why most of the data has no user info attached.

Antisec is still smarting from getting much of its higher ranking leadership arrested from a FBI plant

So really there is no reason AT ALL to believe antisec's claims that they stole the info. There is however a lot more reason to suspect they were trying to stir the pot in the tech community by stoking already present fears of FBI spying which they did a pretty good job at. It gets clueless script kiddies riled up and makes them look cool. Sure the FBI can be shady, but of the law enforcement agencies out there I would honestly have to say they are the least shady of the bunch and tend to release information without bending the truth too much, even when it has the possibility of embarrassing them. Not saying they ALWAYS do it, just saying they tend to be more forthcoming than other government agencies.

Misleading headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA: "At this time there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data"

Saying there's no evidence isn't the same as saying it didn't happen.

This sort of fits...

[Revotron]

...with the general attitude I saw from Slashdot regarding the original story. It almost sounds like a complete fake just because what the hell would the FBI possibly do with a deprecated SHA1 hash of a few device-unique identifiers? Verify that their super-secret gub'mint database of everyone's iPhone MAC addresses and MEIDs has no row errors?

It's worth reiterating from the other story that Apple doesn't even accept apps that reference the UDID any more, and it was never used as a security or authentication feature in the first place. It's like saying "lol, you got pwned, I just got the MD5 hash of your entire hard drive, LULZ LULZ LULZ WE ARE ANON"

If the FBI really wanted some useful information, they could swipe your ESN/MEID and track you down to a cellular level. Hell, they probably already have. Smile at the camera!

So where does that assumption get you?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI are lying about it not being theirs and ANON are lying it about it being theirs.

Is this some sort of Schroedinger's laptop?

Re:I hate to be the one to say this...

[PRMan]

Exactly. Anonymous and Antisec have seemingly been completely honest in the past, when it comes to claiming responsibility for hacks. The FBI is known to lie and cover up. Given past experience, Antisec is more likely to be telling the truth.