The FBI is tracking iPhone users, claims the hacking group known as AntiSec. The ring says that it has released a set of more than 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) taken from the FBI’s files in an effort to alert citizens to the alleged surveillance.
“People are frustrated, they feel the system manipulating them more than ever,” it said in a post on Pastebin. “Never underestimate the power of frustrated people. For the last few years we have broke [sic] into systems belonging to governments and big corporations just to find out they are spending millions of tax dollars to spy on their citizens. They work to discredit dissenting voices. They pay their friends for overpriced and insecure networks and services.”
AntiSec said it has obtained a full 12 million IDs, along with user names, device names, notification tokens, cell phone numbers and addresses—but said it has only released a fraction of the information so that iPhone users can identify whether they have been tracked It has no interest, it said, in harming the public.
“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,” the group said in its statement. In one desktop folder it found a file called NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv, which is a list of the 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices and related personal details.
The NCFTA likely refers to the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, which also prompts the question, if AntiSec’s exploits are true, of whether Apple willingly released the database to that group—and why.