One million Apple IDs leaked online, hackers claim

A hacking group claims to have released one million Apple device IDs that it says were stolen from an FBI computer.

The group AntiSec also claims to have access to more than 12 million other IDs, which it has not released, as well as account holders' personal information. The personal information is said to include user names, device names, telephone numbers and addresses.

  According to experts this information could be handed to spammers and potentially used to infect computers and steal credit card details. In a statement published online the group said that it had published the information to bring attention to the FBI apparently using the details to track Americans. While the personal information has not been releaseed, the hackers claim that a significant number of users will be able to search for their device, using their Apple device ID The statement said that the laptop "was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java.

During the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder." "One of them with the name of ”NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc." Graham Cluley, a computer security expert at Sophos said that the hackers may have chosen not to release personal information, to make it more valuable to criminals. "That is obviously information that has a real value.

 It could be abused in several ways. By publicising the Apple ID details what they are doing is saying we have got all this data- we can prove that we have got it and Apple can test whether these device numbers are correct or not. "They probably either want to exploit [the details] themselves or they might for instance want to sell it on the computer underground to spammers who can send a targeted campaign to those email addresses."

"Maybe it would be claiming to come from Apple, maybe it would contain malicious links or be designed to infect people's computers and potentially steal information such as credit card details " AntiSec, or the Anti Security Movement, is opposed to the computer security industry. Experts say that hacking is a worldwide problem and has become much more visible in the last couple of years, because of the rise of so-called 'hacktivism'

This mixture of hacking and activism is designed to discredit and embarrass large scale organisations. AntiSec said it will not provide further statements until a photo of a writer at a US-based gossip website is featured on the site's front page dressed in a tutu. Adrian Chen is a writer at Gawker who has criticised hacking groups in the past.

Apple declined to comment.

source: telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9519738/One-million-Apple-IDs-leaked-online-hackers-claim.html#