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(courtesy of watchingfrogsboil via flickr.com)
From thenextweb.com (hat tip AitchD):
“The AntiSec hacking group claims to have released a set of more than 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) obtained from breaching the FBI. The group claims to have over 12 million IDs, as well as personal information such as user names, device names, notification tokens, cell phone numbers and addresses.
The hackers issued a statement with the following description on how the data was obtained:
‘During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team 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. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.’
They published the UDID numbers to call attention to suspicions that the FBI used the information to track citizens. (my bolds throughout) Much of the personal data has been trimmed, however, with the hackers claiming to have left enough for “a significant amount of users” to search for their devices.
“TNW has contacted the FBI for comment. Meanwhile, AntiSec says it will not provide further statements or interviews until a mysterious request is fulfilled – to have a photo of a Gawker staff writer dressed in a tutu featured on the company’s homepage.
Update: The TNW tech team has built a tool to let you check whether your device was included in the list.
(See below for the Gawker photo in response to Anonymous). And from wired’s threat level:
“The FBI (also) said it did not possess a file containing the data the hackers said they stole.
In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, the FBI said, “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.” [snip]
But the FBI disputes this. The FBI did not say whether the NCFTA, which was allegedly referred to in the file name the hackers obtained, possessed the data.
NCFTA refers to the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance. The NCFTA is a non-profit that was founded in 1997 by FBI agent Dan Larkin as a conduit between private industry and law enforcement agencies to help them exchange data and cooperate on cases. The organization’s members include financial institutions, telecommunications firms, ISPs, and other private industries.
The NCFTA did not respond to a call seeking comment”.
From computerworld.com, quoting AntiSec:
““This is our next challenge: to decide whether to become tools for the system, or for ourselves. The system plans to use us to hold the next in their endless wars, their cyberwars. Hackers vs. hackers, slaves vs slaves.” The AntiSec statement adds, “We are trapped.”
Displeased after NSA Chief General Keith Alexander spoke at Def Con, attempting to “seduce” hackers to improve Internet security and to recruit hackers for future cyberwars, AntiSec hackers said, “We decided we’d help out Internet security by auditing FBI first.” If a leak of 1,000,001 Apple device UDIDs linked to users and their APNS tokens doesn’t seem massive enough, the hackers say that’s a mere drop in the bucket and claim the original file had about 12 million!
How was this accomplished? By exploiting Java—what a shocker! And no it wasn’t the newest migraine-inducing Java zero-day for which Oracle finally issued an emergency patch. The hack was allegedly accomplished in March, so the hackers exploited the previous Java zero-day. [snip]
“If it’s true that the FBI is tracking people via devices, it doubtfully begins and ends with Apple products. If it’s true, it’s not very lulzy and we should all care.
The intrepid Emptywheel is on it, and says:
“There are multiple ways FBI could have collected this information–either using an NSL or Section 215 request or an insecure transmissions to an ad or game server. And no one knows how the FBI was using it. Whatever you think about Anonymous, we may finally learn more about how the government is tracking geolocation.
But here’s one other concern. Assuming that’s an official FBI database, not only the FBI has it, but also the National Counterterrorism Center. And they’ve got access to whatever federal databases they want to cross-check with existing counterterrorism databases. And one of the few checks we have on the use of our data in this way is a Privacy Act SCOTUS just watered down.
This is a massive amount of data the government likely has no good excuse for having collected, much less used. But it’s likely just one tip of a very big iceberg.”
(Adrian Chen responds, in this sorta ha ha form.)
If all this is so, and I have no reason to doubt it given the host of ways our civil rights and privacy have already been stolen, today is not only another Terror Tuesday, but another in a continuing march of Funeral Days for our Constitution. Remember: any of us can now be disappeared with no recourse under the law. Feel the burn!
(cross-posted at kgblogz.com)
64 Comments
Please don’t expect me to know anything about all this; yer ten-year-old neighbor likely knows more than I do. Seriously.
So, commenters: feel free to weigh in and help out.
Excellent MyFDL scrod, wendydavis!
‘Apple iOS devices’ would be iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad (the devices which use Apple’s operating system (iOS for iPhone & iPod Touch) (iOS for iPad)for those devices.
The report and the alleged hack mentions nothing about Macintosh computers, which don’t use the iOS operating system. Presumably they aren’t part of the issue.
Er…isn’t scrod a kind of cod? I like cod; Mr.wd laughs at the way I pronounce it, though. Havin’ some tonight, as a matter of fact (I need the brain food). ;o)
Thanks for adding the gadjet list; I haven’t ever even held a Smartphone or seen any of the others. Yell into cell phones like they’re tin cans with strings carrying the sound.
Thank ya, dear, and oooh! Ya provided links!
As to your final sentence, please notice me nodding sagely… ;o)
I heard that scrod in Boston means the catch of the day. Often haddock or cod. Elizabeth Kolbert has written about the near-extinction of fish in the Atlantic.
Speaking of fishy i-devices, here’s a complete perm (as it’s called in Flatbush) by Margaret Atwood:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Ach; at least Atwood I’ve read muchly, and that goes with ICCAT quite well-ly. But now, when we eat fish, we need to remember the BP Oil Disaster, cesium in fish on the West Coast, GM salmon, and prolly fageddaboudit shrimp.
Ah well; we’re gonna die anyway; since we know that, ‘the fall’s the thing’.
But: do you have any doubts that the Fibbies are trackin’ people in this manner?
WE ARE ALL CHUM NOW!
~ wendydavis
Doesn’t matter what I think, but I’ll guess that Marcy has tracked the whereabouts of Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl, to see if he’s still special or even breathing.
Here’s a codpast for MyFDL Movie Night, starring a native Bostonian: Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish
The other micro tool being used to spy on individuals are the ‘Trojans’. The link I provide is to a news story about the German government seeking to employ a person with skills in maneuvering said trojans to perform ‘investigations’.
Another piece of news for spying on people is more of a macro approach. They have been scouring tons of Facebook postings, Tweets and social media trying to establish “patterns of interest” which could lead to ‘persons of interest’ a la Minority Report profiling.
Thanks wendydavis!! I will see if I can find the link to the social media spying stuff. It was in something called the California Report.
oops. It was in California Watch, a column under the HuffPo flagship.
I am trying to pay attention to this unlawful violation of our civil rights, partly because I think that it harms our creativity and pollutes our otherwise joyful souls with fears we don’t need; and, partly because it is created by professional psychologists and scientists who are violating their vows to behave ethically.
Abbbie! Can’t wait to watch, and soooo On Topic! Thanking you. ;o)
So, the question is, why is the FBI being so coy?
There is no longer even a pretense of accountability or rule of law for government officials, so why bother to deny it and why continue to rely on organizations like NCTFA for plausible dependability? Let me guess, it’s election time!
BTW, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the data didn’t come from Apple itself. Not that I’m making any accusations, mind you, just saying it wouldn’t surprise me :)
Thanks, TomThumb. From your link:
Seems the Feds get that their hackers are inferior, which is why they’re trying to recruit volunteers, and pissed these folks off. Obviously the other way to ‘recruit’ is to bust hackers, turn them for reduction in, or dropping, charges. Cagey devils. (Ptui.)
Okay, I finally gave up reading; long, and lots of programs. As to Facebook:
Creates the story line they want or fear, or pretend to fear. Jayzus, TomThumb. I spoke to a friend in Atlanta today, and he asked WTH this civil rights robbery isn’t on everyone’s lips, and what *possible* justification somersaults could OBomba voters voice knowing all this?
A seriously good question, no?
Sorry if it is too much info. I just wanted to provide more of a basis to the premise that the surveillance is ‘total’ and constant. Tartan just came out with a program that linked all of the communicating Occupy Wall Streeters in a sociogram to demonstrate who influences whom. So this is making a lot of money for installers, programmers, analysts, manufacturers, and security personnel. Interesting how the PTB are leaving all of this reporting about surveillance out on the web for us to Google. The Tartan chart of social influencers included a light blue square code for their ‘informants’. Nice/s people/s.
This is the PrivacySoS link to the info on Tartan software.
‘Coy’ is right, isn’t it? They issued the old stand-by: a non-denial denial.
Dunno about Apple providing the list; would AntiSec be able to see that? I just dunno how this stuff works.
The Facebook data-mining is creepy; all of it is. But it reminded me that at one time kgb had said that come (hopefully) the social/mass civil disobedience/revolution, there needs to be some network for communication that can’t be shut down. Agreed, but even the rudiments sound hard enough that idjits like me may never cotton on to the instructions.
Surveillance is total and constant if they have some reason to home in on you. And by invoking national security, they don’t even need a court’s permission to do so.
The trick is matching up internet communications with a person. When they get a list like the Apple iOS list that matches up UDIDs with people’s names, it is like gold to them. They can then pluck all internet traffic associated with that UDID, and therefore the person of interest, just as easy as if they were listening in on phone call in the old days of wiretaps
So, for example, if you are a journalist at a political convention and you use an iOS device, bingo, they know not only what you are communicating, but also who you are communicating with. Couple that with the new and improved extrajudicial powers carved out by Obama and you could be in deep doodoo if they don’t like what you are doing.
No no no…I’ll read more later, and am glad to have the links here. Just too much for tonight, and it’s slow going for me at my level of…non-comprehension.
What looked very clear is how willing so many are to exploiting weaknesses and selling data. The bidness of…not only America. Thanks so much for all the help.
Well we are so truly fucked, and so few know it, or would believe they or their friends and families could ever be targets. ‘Invoking national security’ is the thing, isn’t it? Like Cyber McCarthyism, with even potentially more disastrous results.
And no recourse under the law. Where’s my Soma?
I’m for bed, dears. Good night, and thanks for all the help, everyone.
Sleep well: your National Guard is awake…..
Based on my understanding, it would pretty much have had to come from Apple servers, either wittingly or unwittingly. They are the only ones originally in possession of all that matching data to begin with., I.E, the device ID along with matching owner name and owner’s personal information and notification tokens.
The question is, did Apple supply the information willingly, or were their servers hacked by whomever supplied the info to NCFTA, the FBI, or whoever. Dunno the answer to that one.
Yes, it’s the big question. Poking around a bit this morning, there were some comments advising that this all a feint (reason undeclared) because there are so many government/corporate spies within Anonymous and AntiSec, etc.
I saw the opinion expressed more than once that the info could have come via the various apps that used the ID’s. Does that have any meaninginful use?
Also a theme that Congress will launch theatrical investigations; I dunno. As you said, it’s election season, so…stay tuned to C-Span, arggh.
Thanks Wendy. I was just asking on another thread how to check the list to see if my device is on it. Recommended.
heh. I just read the tutorial linked above to find my device number and wondered if I have iTunes. LOL.
Welcome, snapdragon. I assume you found the link?
Kgb has some interesting thoughts over yonder at our Home site; usually I cannae understand a word he says about tech issues, but he tries to knock it down a dozen notches for me. ;o)
You might pop over and ask kgb, see if he can help you out on that. Or others on this thread. You can always get in thru a captcha for now, though I dunno if you can get emailed with comments without registering, so you might have to check back.
A lot of citizens may be dead set against groups like Anonymous and AntiSec, but once the govt finishes it’s relentless and well-financed effort to co-opt them, we won’t have anyone left to fight back against govt and corporate predations.
Assange is going to have a lot more company as time goes by.
Soon you’ll see PR on govt run sting operations recruiting misfits for “terrorist” hacking plots. Gotta keep the pretense alive so you can get increased funding from congress year after year.
Hmmm, good question. 12 million IDs is prolly a small subset of all UDID’s so maybe it did come from some rouge apps. I wonder if certain apps are a common denominator within the data?
I also don’t know how Apple uses encryption, especially with apps, but if I make the assumption that they do and also assume they use it rigorously, I’d also have to assume that someone on the inside of either Apple, or apps gave out the info after being it was decrypted. Either that or they provided keys along with the data.
Hmmm, dunno about that one. The status quo Repubs have no beef with the concept of government spying and the staus quo Dems sure as hell ain’t gonna go after Obama’s FBI. I know I’m generalizing but you get my drift.
Once you take away the status quo pols, you ain’t got anyone left with the juice to make hearings happen.
In this PDF, the makers of social relationship analysis software explain their methods.
The most simple way in which law enforcement now track people online at social media sites is by becoming their “friend”, by friending them and then following their every comment. This is beyond creepy but I guess the solution is to stay offline if you do not want to be stalked. If this technology is widely available, it is probably likely that private individuals and businesses are using these techniques for their own nefarious, dark purposes.
For some reason I wasn’t getting system emails from Home, so I didn’t know that kgb had weighed in. He wonders if it might have been some mobile ad network that lots of different apps use.
(You can click in for the rest.) He brought a Forbes link that’s really interesting as well, and one from Gizmodo he thinks is…dopey as all giddy-up, as if none of it amounted to that big a security breach for users.
Might have been the Forbes link that said Stangl was targeted exactly for making the conference call that asked hackers to join their fight, or whatever. I’d thought one of the pieces had said it was a trade show, but there will be conflicting info, it seems.
If Congress holds a hearing, it will only be to placate people who care, I think, as in: for the cameras. Stangl looks like a deer frozen in the headlights, in any event. But your point is good, they’d calculate the political upsides first.
Do handheld devices have a function for discovering which apps are loaded like larger computers do? So ysd could discover it iTunes are on her…thingie?
It knocks me out how many of you understand this stuff, TomThumb.
But from the pdf:
“Although SAS SNA was originally
designed for fraud, the flexible interface allows us to customize it to our needs.”
Innovation spurred by criminal intent; how droll.
I dunno, based on the info that AntiSec says is on the list, in my limited knowledge, I don’t see how this could be true unless the ad network was an information supplying cog in a bigger harvesting wheel or perhaps an interface conduit to a data harvesting trojan on the Apple device.
I’ll check that out, but it sounds like that writer either has an agenda or is as dumb as a paving stone.
As to potential hearings, I can’t find fault with anything you say.
I’m prolly the last person to ask cuz due their closed and proprietary nature, I avoid Apple products like the plague. Apple can pretty much embed whatever it wants in iOS and you have to trust them to do what is right. Not me sweetie.
Snapdragon, I dunno which device you have, but googling (binging, I guess) found this. It might help you to discover what’s on the thing.
Don’t blame you, darlin’. I won’t even go on Facebook after mistakenly logging in to read a link a friend emailed me. Once I read more about it, I resigned, but…they wouldn’t let me resign. Finally did, but it was akin to leaving the Latter Day Saints. Hard, iow.
Lord luv a duck; kgb just linked to Adrian Chen doin’ his tutu/shoe thing. Lotta clicks for Chen today.
Strange days.
I’m not eating *any* ocean-caught seafood anymore. Strictly trout/pike/salmon(landlocked)/etc for me. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m waiting until about 10 years after they stop dumping raw Fukishima waste (want to see which 12-headed species turn out most *tasty* ;-). There’s some of our old mine stuff in the lake-beds … but that’s a pretty known locale and honestly way less polluted than typical ocean catches(of course, I can’t actually seem to *catch* a fish of my own to save my life).
Somewhat related (and even more OT) … heard more stories about crazy mutated fish getting pulled out of the Columbia north of Tri-Cities a while back (from all that Hanford stuff I’m assuming). Wonder what they think about that over in Portland … that crap *must* be flowing downstream, right? Damn I’m glad to live near the *source* of our waterways!
Oh crap … you almost made me spit coffee at my monitor. That’s funny as hell.
I don’t really do Apple much, but I’m pretty positive if someone has an iOS device, they have iTunes.
Of course, that doesn’t mean much if they never used it.
Maybe according to alleged re-reporter Samantha Murphy, at a site that appears to be a (we)blog, “Apple has reportedly responded to claims that a hacking group called AntiSec Apple compromised 12 million Apple iOS Unique Device IDs (UDIDs) and personal information from the laptop of an FBI staffer, saying the company never provided that data to the FBI or anyone else.”
I’d sooner trust Samantha Bee. (urmph, gurgle,ooof, mglp). ;o)
(ya think I might be ready for sleeeep? 3 a.m. seems sooo looong ago….)
Good-o; hope ysd comes back. Thank you, dear. The link said ya could arrange *everything* thru iTunes; didn’t take their meaning.
Er…we aim ta please; wd thinks she’s funny as hell, but her detractors…disagree.
(Rolling Stone says she laughs harder than the audience at her own jokes, but keep in mind: her father forced her to watch Red Skelton as an infant.)
She was on Ed Sullivan thrice as a child. Category: making faces. She netted something under $23,000 for her ugly faces in front of live audiences. Nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah; I watch Arnie Gundersen (‘son’?) and Helen Caldicott on youtube (when I have the stomach for it). News.Not.Good.
OTOH, I eat some cod, reckoning ya gotta eat, and most of the foods are now Gen-modified, as are mosquitoes, tra la la. ‘Organic’ don’t mean too very much these days, and we can’t afford it anyway. Gonna die from somethin’.
‘Ya can’t swim?!?! Hell, it’s the fall that’s gonna kill ya!!!”
(We still have three bags of pre-BP gulf shrimp in the freezer…hope they don’t get freezer burn while they’re…in reserve.)
Got barrels full of legumes and seeds and dried shrooms, a food celaar stuffed to the gills… I bought in ’08, all are well, though we been dippin’ into stuff now and again when $ is thin.
Livin’ in this early-settled Mormon canyon musta rubbed off; plus: all the others were either Kansa Dust Bowl escapess or fled the mines in Montana.
That’s not necessarily true. Basically, any app is going to have information about the device it’s installed on. When I first played with mobile ads, iPhones were running the same networks as Android. There are *all sorts* of targeting fields built in to the ad APIs (which get sent from the apps directly to a 3rd party ad server) that was seemingly held over from what the iOS apps were doing. Don’t know if they changed what could be sent back when Apple’s mobile ad network came online and they stopped letting iOS apps use 3rd party ads or not. I know Apple has tightened up what they’ll allow most apps to do *over the last couple of months* (I don’t think they let apps send the UUID back anymore), but to this point I it seems to have been pretty wide-open.
I’m not entirely sure about the push-tokens but I *think* they may be app-specific; if I understand right, theoretically Apple could look at the encryption keys and should be able to tell for certain if they came from one app or not. So the inclusion of those might actually point to data from an app or group of apps being the culprit. Inclusion of the tokens in only some records would indicate to me a stronger likelihood that the data was collected from multiple sources and combined into a master list.
Which leads me to observe that we shouldn’t discount that this could be a working investigative table. If that’s the case, they’d have started with a table of the raw UUID dump and app-collected metrics … maybe adding data from several sources. This table would serve as the dataset of potential target IDs. Then columns would be added for any matching information that they might want to generate on a specific target record. After that, they could take any number of investigative approaches to flesh it out for whatever purpose; data-mine social networks algorithmically for matches, fill in blanks with direct research, etc. A previous Anon hack revealed that HB Gary was trying to pull off something like this (on behalf of government/corporate clients) as were a couple of others.
Still to early to tell for sure what’s going on. Interesting as all hell to speculate about though.
And just to clarify. My experience was with ad networks, but many app developers have private servers that extend the functionality of their software. The iDevice will communicate directly with these servers – which requires exchanging information.
My point was that whatever information could be sent back to the ad server would have been available for the app to send back to any other server as well. From all appearance, that information could be pretty extensive. Even if Apple changed the ad-related data collection policies, it wouldn’t impact how apps interacted with their own servers.
Yeah, saying it pretty much had to have come from Apple servers was a little strong.
What I should have said was that the easiest way to get that kind of data all wrapped up and ready to go, would be to get it from where it is collected and stored, versus collecting it yourself through various means and piecing it together.
Considering the ever increasing symbiosis between corporations and government “law” enforcement, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just what they did.
But, yes, your last statement is correct.
It will be very interesting to see if an analysis of the data reveals any common denominators that might tie the individual records together in some way. Who knows, maybe it’s a list of all the users who protested the drone strike app censorship. Yah, I know that’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m trying to make a point, an well, you know, stranger things have happened.
How fucking hilarious is this?!?
Just woke up and checked my email One was from the White House. In part:
“More and more Americans are using their phones to get the information they want, whenever — and wherever — they want it. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you’re reading this email on your phone.
Take the White House’s website for example. In 2010, 5 percent of visitors used a mobile device to access WhiteHouse.gov. Two years later that number has tripled to 15 percent — and it’s only getting higher.
President Obama believes government should be open and accessible, and in today’s increasingly mobile world that means bringing his entire administration into the palm of your hand.
So if you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, get the free, upgraded app now:
(then da link!) Whooop!
Never got email from the White House, mostly I get phishing bait.
Coincidentally, that 12 million figure is the same as the US dollar amount I’m expecting to have deposited into my bank account by a former Nigerian minister of finance.
Rolling and laughing, my man!
(You ferget; me and Barack are like this [twines fingahs], so I get his HotMail!)
Oh fer heaven’s gate! I just checked my email and I find an invitation ‘reminder’ from a Facebook person who knows me to join Facebook or reply to her (I’ve never joined FB). Also a reminder from two LinkedIn people that there’s messages for me. I signed up two years ago to LinkedIn when a firedoglake staffer requested me to be a contact. I cancelled a day later and changed my passwords everywhere.
I know what yer thinking: WTF’s yer point?
This thread and its links, plus my own thread-related searches, evidently trigger pings of whiplash to my IP. Though I delete all cookies and cache hits every session, it’s too late.
I use this anonymizer a lot, but not when I click most links.
You too!?!
I thought I was the only one on a first-name basis with Barack, Michelle, and Joe, and also Jim and several other of Barack’s minions whose names escape me.
It’s a fake first-name, for sure, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
I’ve never seen people beg so much for money, tsk, tsk.
In another moment of serendipity, Cyndi’s ‘Gonna be strong’ came on just now as I clicked in. Gotta scoot to build some dinner, but I shall return (she threatened). ;o)
This is even better.
Secret Service Investigates Claim That Romney’s Tax Returns Were Stolen
Don’t know how true this is but TPM is reporting it as well.
Of cousre Pricewaterhouse is denying it.
They make apps for whiplash, don’t they? Stiffly cervicals?
What language was that link in? Don’t have a google translator for that, methinks.
Heh.
“The contents of the flash drive are still unknown. They could be Mitt Romney’s tax records. They could be a vast collection of cat videos. We don’t know, yet.
Not for nothing, though, the infamous Sarah Palin email hack was done from Tennessee — by the son of outgoing state Rep. Mike Kernell — and that turned out to be legit.”
Yeah; reckon they’d trust em to stay ‘confidential’. Come on; somebody’s looked at the flash drive!
I don’t think that’s the point though. Could be to goad Mittens into saying something like “There can’t possibly be any returns on those drives. I never filed any.”
LOL! Kinda like kgb reckoned the FBI was goading Anon.
Delicious. Please let the story be true…
This is the URL my computer’s browser opens when I click that link:
https://startpage.com/eng/aboutstartpage/
I’m guessing that /eng/ up there ^ means ‘English’. Could it mean this?
(I prefer Mandy doing it.)
Maybe they’ll search the thumb drive only to get rickrolled.
If it is a hoax, the mastermind took ideas from the dirty tricks of the Nixon days–break ins, party headquarters, even a bitcoin challenge to try to follow the money. I’m guessing the hoaxer has a good grasp of history and either is a savvy intellectual type with a good sense of humor or a dull, prosaic party operative who envies the reputation of the of yore.
That should be the ratfuckers of yore.
Thank you for your excellent post, Wendy. And congratulations on being front paged. Your writing deserves it!
I dunno; the whole thing’s odd. If the ‘hackers’ needed to be in the Pricewaterhouse building… From the PC link update:
“An excerpt from the hacker letter details the alleged theft of the data:
“Romney’s 1040 tax returns were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of the building. Once on the 3rd floor, the team moved down the stairs to the 2nd floor and setup shop in an empty office room. During the night, suite 260 was entered, and all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied. A package was sent to the PWC on suite 260 with a flash drive containing a copy of the 1040 files, plus copies were sent to the Democratic office in the county and copies were sent to the GOP office in the county at the beginning of the week also containing flash drives with copies of Romney’s tax returns before 2010. A scanned signature image for Mitt Romney from the 1040 forms were scanned and included with the packages, taken from earlier 1040 tax forms gathered and stored on the flash drives.”
I couldn’t remember how bitcoins worked, went a-googling, and wow, is this a month for hacking!
Meanwhile, arstechnica explains why the UDIDs stolen by AntiSec are a privacy concern. (too early for my eyes to read, let alone my brain to grasp) ;oP
Oh, dear, Hi-Def; I am soooo lost! Sorry to be so thick: no comprende.
But Englebert might just be a deal-breaker, dear. Plus: an ad for Jackie Evancho; yikes, between the two of em, I wanted to put my head in the oven. (I always forget it’s electric…)
Thanks, openhope, for the vote of confidence, but since I know zip about all this stuff, all I could do was paste in others’ explanations of it. And really I did it for AitchD; blame him. ;o)
(The mod didn’t stick in a page break, either; kinda embarrasskin’.)
LOL! That’s what I get for always coming to a thread and zipping to the bottom of the comments; do you have *any* idea how funny that sentence looks as a stand-alone?
“That should be the ratfuckers of yore.”