The Real Source Of Apple Device Ids Leaked By Anonymous Last Week

[Spartan]

A small Florida publishing company says the million-record database of Apple gadget identifiers released last week by the hacker group Anonymous was stolen from its servers two weeks ago. The admission, delivered by the company’s CEO exclusively to NBC News, contradicts Anonymous' claim that the hacker group stole the data from an FBI agent's laptop in March.

Anonymous’ accusations garnered attention because they suggested that the FBI was using the unique gadget identifiers -- called UDIDs -- to engage in high-level spying on American citizens via their iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. The FBI denied the claim, last week, and when asked to comment for this story, referred to last week’s denial.

Users who are concerned their UDID might be in the leaked list really don’t have any good options for dealing with the issue – generally, the UDID cannot be changed in the way a user might change a password after that had been stolen by hackers.
“There's nothing you can do. The UDID is permanently burned into the device,” Schuetz said.

Paul DeHart, CEO of the Blue Toad publishing company, told NBC News that technicians at his firm downloaded the data released by Anonymous and compared it to the company's own database. The analysis found a 98 percent correlation between the two datasets."That's 100 percent confidence
level, it's our data," DeHart said. "As soon as we found out we were involved and victimized, we approached the appropriate law enforcement officials, and we began to take steps to come forward, clear the record and take responsibility for this.”

DeHart said an outside researcher named David Schuetz contacted his company last week and suggested the data might have come from Blue Toad. The company's forensic analysis then showed it had been stolen "in the past two weeks." He declined to provide further details, citing an ongoing investigation.
“I had no idea the impact this would ultimately cause,” DeHart continued. “We're pretty apologetic to the people who relied on us to keep this information secure."

DeHart said he could not rule out the possibility that the data stolen from his company’s servers was shared with others, and eventually made its way onto an FBI computer. He also said that he doesn’t know who took the data.
The discovery of the theft casts serious doubt on Anonymous’ claims that the data came from the FBI, and was pilfered in March.

"Timing-wise, (their) story doesn't make sense," he said.
Both Apple and the FBI were quick to deny that they were conspiring to use UDIDs to track U.S. citizens; the FBI said it never had the data, and Apple said in a statement it had never given the data to the FBI.

"As an app developer, BlueToad would have access to a user's device information such as UDID, device name and type," Apple spokeswoman Trudy Mullter told NBC News on Monday. "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."

Blue Toad is a little-known privately held company, but its technology touches millions of users around the world. It provides private-label digital edition and app-building services to 6,000 different publishers, and serves 100 million page views each month, DeHart said. He declined to discuss business partners, but said the list of clients includes household names.

DeHart said his firm would not be contacting individual consumers to notify them that their information had been compromised, instead leaving it up to individual publishers to contact readers as they see fit.

Schuetz, the researcher who discovered the source of the data, told NBC News that he was able to determine that Blue Toad was the source of the leak by tying together clues within the leaked data. In addition to the UDIDs, the data leaked by Anonymous also included the name given to each gadget by its owner.

Intrepidus Group researcher David Schuetz tells NBC News how he figured out the source of the stolen Apple device IDs.

“I spent most of Tuesday evening obsessing over this,” said Schuetz, who works for the Intrepidus Group, a New York-based mobile device security consulting firm.
Schuetz said that after pouring over the information, he found numerous devices within the data which had names that included the phrase Blue Toad or variations of that, such as “Blue Toad support.” Some of the gadgets’ names also suggested they belonged to various departments within Blue Toad and were shared among multiple employees

[HAPPYLESS]

[img]http://gifsoup.com/view2/3950052/bralooks-o.gif[/img]

[littlemoon]

intha pedadhi ela chdavliii

[Spartan]

[quote name='littlemoon' timestamp='1347302979' post='1302455779']
intha pedadhi ela chdavliii
[/quote]


++

[littlemoon]

[quote name='ChittiNaidu' timestamp='1347303066' post='1302455791']


++
[/quote]

ante??

b/w nice article just finished reading...

[bhargava_v]

summary enti:

who is correct blue toad or anonymous???

[Spartan]

[quote name='CASANOVA' timestamp='1347303587' post='1302455861']
summary enti:

who is correct blue toad or anonymous???
[/quote]


anonymous