What Do Apple, The FBI, And Anonymous Have In Common?

Well, Anonymous says they hacked an FBI laptop and stole Apple information over Labor Day weekend, and Apple and the FBI are both denying it.

It’s all he-said-she-said. The FBI denies ever having that information AND that they were hacked, and Apple denies ever giving them that information. The Anonymous group, AntiSec, claims that it’s all true.

The information in question is 12 million Apple UDIDs, or unique device identifiers (kind of like a VIN), tied to iPhones, iPads, and iTouches.

AntiSec claims to have hacked into FBI special agent Christopher K. Stangl’s laptop and stolen a spreadsheet containing the 12 million UDIDs with user names, device names and types, Apple push notification keys, zip codes, mobile phone numbers and addresses. AntiSec leaked a series of UDIDs, without all the personal information, over the weekend.

Once you get over the fact that Anonymous hacked into the FBI, you begin to wonder, if this is actually true, WHY the FBI had all this information in the first place.

Cue creepy conspiracy music, if you so desire.

The FBI issued a statement saying that “at this time”, there was no evidence supporting the hack or that the information was ever in the possession of the FBI.

Apple issued a similar statement denying that said information was ever requested or provided to the FBI, and that with the iOS 6, a new set of application programming interfaces was meant to replace UDIDs and that UDIDs were soon to be banned.

Anonymous, in the mean time, issued a statement saying that they do have this information and implied that more leaks are on the way.

So what does that mean for the average Apple user? If Anonymous does have this information, it could be used to gain access to personal information. So, as always, keep an eye on that stuff you don’t want other people to have, like credit card numbers linked to Apple’s iTunes and App Store.

And stay tuned for more developments. I would venture a guess that we haven’t heard the last of this quite yet.