Someone is claiming that the one million UDIDs posted by Anonymous actually were taken from them and not the FBI or Apple. The company Blue Toad from Orlando FL says that they checked the pastebin file and it was a 98% match for their database. This is an interesting twist in the events that have seen Apple, the FBI and even AT&T linked to surveillance of Apple phones through the use of the UDID (Unique Device IDentifier). Apple has already stated that the UDID will no longer be supported in the next version of their iOS software that is expected to be released to the world tomorrow.

Yesterday the Internet was caught up in the fact that for some reason an FBI Special Agent had 12 Million Apple UDIDs (Unique Device IDentifiers) along with connected personal information on his laptop. At the time the reports appeared to indicate that this was an FBI-Issued laptop and not a personal one. This small detail was overshadowed by many due to how the information was uncovered. A group known as AntiSec, who is part of the larger Anonymous collective, claimed that they found it after hacking into the agent’s laptop using a fairly common tool.

In a bold move AntiSec (part of the Anonymous movement) has decided to release what they claim is 1.7GB of files from a branch of the US Department of Justice. Unlike many other dumps which have been on Pastebin this time they chose to use The Pirate Bay. We are guessing that it has to do with the size of the dump (a fairly hefty 1.7GB), but could also be partly due to issues that have popped up with Pastebin and their decision to remove dumps like this as quickly as possible. Then dump was been tweeted about on the twitter feed PlanetHacks who has claimed responsibility for posting the file (the name of the person tweeting about it is Joke which makes us Wonder…). According to the Twitter feed the attack was “a local file inclusion to obtain an encrypted password, and decrypted it afterwards.”

Anonymous had a rather big weekend starting off with taking down the CIA’s public website cia.gov. This was done through an interesting trick that appeared to be a combination of a DDoS and some DNS tinkering. On the day of the outage the CIA’s website resolved to 192.81.129.107 which when looked up showed as an address belonging to an IP pool in the UK. Once the attack was completed the site resolved to 192.81.129.130 which is undeniably part of the same range, but now shows as a US IP range.  Looking at the evidence this could possibly be a new form of attack from the collective. Unfortunately we just do not have enough information on the subject to be sure and the CIA is not releasing any new information.

When we first started following the collective that is called Anonymous we noted that there would come a time when any breach or hack would be thrown at their feet. This has now started to happen as the media (who has never really understood the situation) attempts to appear informed on the social hacking that is taking place in the world today. On December 25th the group AntiSec (a group formerly part of Anonymous) hacked into the Strategic Forecasting Website and the servers behind it.

Anonymous has announced they intend to bring the social networking (notworking?) site Facebook down on November 5th.  You might be wondering why Anon would go after Facebook when its founder Mark Zuckerberg has been idolized as a geek and a hacker in many biograph

ies and books.

Plus isn’t Facebook a place where information is freely shared by those that want to share it? Most would have thought that Facebook of all places would be safe. However, it is not and here is why.

This first thing is that Facebook has in the past taken liberty with its user’s images, personal information and has been rumored to pass information along to government agencies in people or groups that may use, let’s say inflammatory language. It has also been rumored (one that no one has been able to confirm) that Facebook maybe allowing advertiser (or governments) to view users preferences and possibly actual pages.  We do know that Anonymous believes this at the very least. Now all of this would be good enough reason for the group of hackers with a cause, but there is more and this is possibly one of the real reasons. You see Facebook is getting ready to launch a facial recognition API that can pull data on people tagged in pictures from sources around the net. It is also rumored to be able to match aliases from dating sites, forums, etc. as long as the API can link the real name with the screen name. This massively privacy invading bit of software has already been declared illegal in Germany and w

e have hopes that other countries will follow.  We believe this is what Anonymous is actually alluding to when they say “for the sake of your own privacy”.  

Much of the rest of their press release (shown in its entirety below) also has truth in it. According to the same German lawmakers that want the Facial Recognition API removed, Facebook makes the removal of the data collected by the software almost impossible to delete even after the image that person was tagged in it removed from the profile.  We think this is what Anon is talking about when they say “your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time”, but it is also true that what you put in Facebook stays on Facebook even when you leave.

So will Anon bring down Zuckerberg and his social networking/ information collection site, or is this another threat that the group will lose interest in before the date they have set aside. A date that hold special meaning to the British and which was immortalized in the move “V for Vendetta”. Will Zuckerberg prepare and harden the Facebook servers? I guess we will see on November the 5th.

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It seems that some members of the AntiSec group have recently released a large amount of information about law enforcement officers to include their names addresses, social security numbers and in some cases credit card information. Now, I have no love at all for corrupt police officers or ones that abuse their position of authority, but exposing their personal information puts innocents at risk.

You see the bad guys rarely go after the officer in question directly. No, they go after the family the wife, kids etc.  So while I have never had an issue with the things that Anonymous have done in the past. For the most part they go after corporate entities that have no respect for the consumer or anyone else for that matter. However this particular portion of the group has stepped over a line that will lose them appeal from the average person. Now the media can claim they have put innocent people at risk (and they have in truth).  

Anonymous was better off when they were going after the corporations and the government instead of releasing information of this type. Of course on the other side of the coin, I also put blame on the people hosting these sites as they are responsible for protecting that information and failed in that duty not once but twice.

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Anon has something of a reputation (like you did not know that). Its reputation is often enough to put fear into people or corporations. So when Anonymous put out a call on their IRC channel targeting PayPal and asking for a mass walkout. Many people left, we would be willing to wager that many of these left because they were scared of Anon hacking the internet bank (yes PayPal is a bank). Of course you have to wonder about why Anon would target PayPal in the first place… Well that is a pretty long story.