Andre Yoskowitz
10 Jun 2010 12:09
AT&T has confirmed today that 114,067 iPad 3G owners have had their email information leaked to the Web, with the data being stolen by a group calling themselves Goatse Security.
The group published the emails, which included prominent politicians, celebrities and even military officials.
AT&T says that only email addresses were leaked, however, with any sensitive data like credit card numbers not being compromised.
Reads the AT&T press release: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses. The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained. We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted."
A few of the most notable emails breached, says Gawker are New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson, Diane Sawyer of ABC News, film mogul Harvey Weinstein, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Goatse Security stole the data through a script on AT&T's website. All they needed to do was insert an ICC-ID as part of the HTTP request and the script returned the email address associated with that device.