How to Find Out if Your Apple UDID Was Hacked!

A group of hackers loosely associated with Anonymous called AntiSec claimed early last week that it obtained the UDIDs in March 2012 by breaching the security of a Dell notebook used by an FBI supervisor in New York. They recently leaked about one million Apple UDID numbers from iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices around the world. The one million was a small chunk of a much larger collection (estimated at around 12 million) UDID numbers that the group claims to have gotten from a compromised FBI computer. Whether the numbers actually did come from the FBI remains to be seen, but it doesn’t change the fact that the numbers were indeed hacked. A UDID number is a unique number given to each Apple device. While this number doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own, it could point to a larger security issue present in Apple’s devices. You can check to see if your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad’s UDID was among those leaked by following a few basic steps.

Step 1

Take your Apple device and connect it to your computer. Each iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad model comes with a free USB charging cable at purchase. Use this cable to connect the device to your PC or Mac and load Apple’s free iTunes software, the same way you would if you were syncing new music or movies to your device.

Step 2

Locate the “Devices” section of the iTunes program interface. Note that this section only appears when an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad is connected to your computer. The name of your device will be in this section. Click your device’s name to continue.

Step 3

Click the tab at the top of the screen labeled “Summary.” The window that loads will contain general information about your device, including its name, capacity, software version and more. Your device’s serial number will also be listed at the top of the screen.

Step 4

Click the “Serial Number” option one time. Instead of your serial number, iTunes will now display the UDID of your device in this screen. Write down this number on a piece of paper. You can also click “Edit” at the top of iTunes and select “Copy Identifier” to copy the UDID number to your computer’s clipboard.

Step 5

Visit TheNextWeb.com and search for the site’s Apple UDID check using the “Search” box at the top of the screen. The editors at TheNextWeb.com have created a tool that allows you to enter your UDID and automatically compare it against the database of identifiers leaked by Anonymous. Paste your UDID into the box labeled “Paste your UDID here.” Click “Check.” If your UDID was among those leaked by the hacker group AntiSec the application will find it in the database during the search. If your UDID is not found, it was not part of the hacking.