According to an exclusive report from NBC News, last week's Anonymous hack, which at the time was reported to have affected 1 million Apple UDIDs obtained from the FBI, was not actually a hack on the FBI at all.


Instead, NBC claims that Paul DeHart, CEO of the Blue Toad publishing company, told it that Blue Toad's technicians found a 98 percent correlation between the AntiSec data released and its own data. It said that that represented a "100 percent confidence level" that it was Blue Toad's data released by Anon.


Anonymous, or at least the group using the name for this particular operation, had claimed that the 1 million UDIDs were part of a cache of 12 million pulled from an FBI agent's laptop. The FBI, however, did not acknowledge any evidence that a compromise had occurred:

"The FBI is aware of published reports alleging that an FBI laptop was compromised and private data regarding Apple UDIDs was exposed. At this time, there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data."

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Looks like they were right on this one. On cue, Apple also washed its hands of the whole ordeal as well.


While there's not much you can do about your UDID being out there, you still shouldn't be too worried if your device is a part of this leak. The UDID and its associated information—especially if they were taken from a single publishing company—are just a small cross section of your online life. And it's not like anything super confidential, like passwords (hashed or unhashed) or credit card information was taken.


So! It's still troubling that user data was hacked. But we can be a little glad that Apple's doing away with most UDID functions in iOS 6. And also that the FBI hasn't, in fact, been found in possession of a giant repository of cellphone data. (Yet.) [NBC via Techmeme]