The fun-loving, government oppression-hating hackers at AntiSec are back in action with the release of over a million Apple user IDs. The encrypted file hit the web late Monday night along with a characteristic rant against everything from the NSA to Bashar Assad. The real target this time around, though, is the FBI from whom the hackers stole the the Apple IDs.As is often the case, the heist was pretty straightforward. All it took was breaking into a single agent’s laptop and swiping a few files. In one labelled “NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” the hackers say they found over 12 million Apple unique device identifiers (UDIDs) along with user names, addresses, phone numbers and Apple push notification tokens. (They say that they "decided a million would be enough to release.") The NCFTA in the filename could very well stand for the National Cyber-Forensic and Training Alliance, self-described as “a conduit between private industry and law enforcement,” leading some to wonder what exactly the FBI was doing with all this user data. Is Apple helping the FBI track their users?For now, we don’t know. Indeed the UDID can be used to track individual users, an issue that privacy advocates have brought up in the past. The data itself was stolen from the laptop of Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team, a nine-year veteran of the agency and, ironically, the star of an FBI recruiting video targeted towards hackers. For now, neither the FBI nor Stangl is commenting on the hack. Apple is also keeping its mouth shut.As they tend to do, AntiSec says this latest hack is just another way to spread “lulz.” Targeting the FBI is also surely an act of vengeance against the myriad arrests the agency made last year in their massive crackdown on Anonymous, AntiSec’s big brother. It’s not very funny if you’re on that list and have ostensibly been tracked by the FBI for the past few years. You can check here to see if you’re one of the lucky many.
Advertisement