Anonymous stole millions of Apple’s UDIDs — but not from the FBI

Last week Anonymous claimed it plucked 12 million unique identifiers associated with iPhones from an FBI laptop. Today, however, a Florida publishing company says it was actually its servers that were hacked, according to NBC News.

On September 4, Anonymous announced that it stole 12 million UDIDs after hacking into what seemed to be a poorly protected FBI agent’s laptop. The group released one million of those numbers as proof that it had actually obtained them. The incident raised questions of government surveillance and what the FBI would be doing with all those UDIDs (which on their own don’t provide give any personal information such as credit card numbers or passwords).

Quickly following the hack, both the FBI and Apple responded. The FBI said it had “no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.” The agency went on to call the claims “totally false.”

Apple later said it hadn’t given the FBI any of the UDIDs and that the FBI had not requested any of them.

According to NBC News, publishing company Blue Toad said it ran the publicly available UDIDs against its own database and found they matched up with 98 percent accuracy. That was enough to convince the small company that its own servers had been hacked, and it has called foul on Anonymous’ claims. The company says it has already reached out to law enforcement but does not plan on contacting those who may have been affected.

As per its website, Blue Toad lets people publish content such as a magazine to a catalog or brochure using its technology. It also works with app development.

“As an app developer, BlueToad would have access to a user’s device information such as UDID, device name, and type,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told NBC News. “Developers do not have access to users’ account information, passwords, or credit card information, unless a user specifically elects to provide that information to the developer.”

via NBC News; Anonymous image via skenmy/Flickr