AT&T Security Hole Exposed IPad E-Mail Addresses (Update1)

By Greg Bensinger and Peter Burrows
June 10 (Bloomberg) -- A security breach in AT&T Inc.’s wireless network exposed the e-mail addresses of some owners of Apple Inc.’s iPad 3G.
AT&T, the second-largest U.S. mobile phone provider, corrected the flaw, the company said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. The New York Times Co. told its staff to shut off iPad wireless access after learning of a breach involving AT&T, according to a memo confirmed yesterday by the New York Times.
A group called Goatse Security said it found a breach that let it uncover information based on a unique code on iPad SIM cards. It then released addresses of iPad owners, including New York Times Co. Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to Gawker Media’s Valleywag.
“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,” Dallas-based AT&T said in the statement. AT&T declined to comment further, spokesman Fletcher Cook said in an e-mail.
The vulnerability adds to Apple’s chagrin two months after an unreleased prototype of the iPhone, lost by an Apple engineer, was disassembled and photographed by Gawker’s technology blog Gizmodo.com.
“This breach is obviously embarrassing for AT&T and for Apple, but knowing the names of the people who bought the first iPads is more intriguing than dangerous,” Joris Evers, a spokesman for security-software maker McAfee Inc., said in an interview from Santa Clara, California.
2 Million IPads
Apple has sold more than 2 million iPads since releasing the device in April. Some models of the iPad tablet work with AT&T’s third-generation wireless network, and other versions only work on Wi-Fi networks. Apple doesn’t say how many of each model it has sold.
AT&T said it continues to investigate and found no evidence that any other customer data was revealed.
AT&T rose 43 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $25.33 at 9:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock had declined 11 percent this year before today.
Apple representatives Steve Dowling and Natalie Kerris didn’t respond to requests for comment.
--With assistance from Connie Guglielmo and Rochelle Garner in San Francisco. Editors: Tom Giles, Stephen West.
To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net; Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net.
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