iPad 3G owners had their email addresses exposed in what is being called a major security breach for Apple.
This leaves approximately 114,000 iPad 3G owners wide-open to spam marketing and malicious hacking, including some high level military officials, CEOs and politicians.
Those who got in on the frenzy when the iPad 3G went on sale April 30 are included in this breach of private information. If ever there was an "A" list that people did not want to be on, this is it.
Big names who are on this list ? According to the site Valleywag, some of the names on the list includes New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson, Diane Sawyer of ABC News, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
It is suspected that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was also compromised.
Who did the hacking? The group called Goatse hacked AT&T's Web servers and gave this information to Valleywag. The same company that owns Valleywag, Gawker Media, also owns the site Gizmodo. Back in April, Gizmodo made headlines for purchasing an iPhone 4 prototype and exposing it to the world on their site.
What information was hacked from iPad 3G owners? Valleywag stated that the information exposed included "subscribers' email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T's network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber."
According to a statement made by AT&T on Wednesday, "The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted."
Who takes responsibility, Apple or AT&T? Apple requires that iPad owners provide an email address to activate service. Although it is AT&T's servers that exposed the email addresses, but some may blame Apple because customers have no other choice than to use AT&T service until Apple allows the iPad to connect through other mobile carriers.
Read the full report about the iPad 3G security breach on Valleywag here.
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